The Santa Clara County Public Health Department announced during a press conference Wednesday that workers in education and child care, food and agriculture, emergency services and adults 65 years or older are eligible to receive the coronavirus vaccine beginning Feb. 28.
Dr. Sarah Cody, Santa Clara County’s public health officer, said this is phase 1B, tier-one under the California vaccine distribution system.
She said the transition is possible because the number of residents getting vaccinated and vaccine supply to the county have gradually increased, while the number of COVID-19 cases has gradually decreased since the first week of January.
“In our own county health system, a vaccine provider, we have had nearly 10,000 vaccination appointments scheduled just for [Wednesday],” Cody said during the press conference which was livestreamed on Facebook.
The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been supplied to Santa Clara County totaling a combined 327,251 administered doses as of Wednesday, according to the California COVID-19 website.
The county’s mass vaccine distribution site, Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, distributes both vaccines to be administered to more than 6,000 residents per day at multiple sites within the county, including sites at Burger Drive and the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds, according to the public health department’s website.
“As we continue as we expand this access, we will continue our focus on equity to ensure that those who are living in communities that have been hardest hit by COVID-19 have access to vaccines and get vaccinated,” Cody said.
Rosa Luna, public health deputy director, said the county has conducted a multi-layered outreach and access strategy to ensure equitable distribution.
“No one size fits all and we need to decrease barriers,” Luna said during the press conference.
She said the public health department is planning to provide more evening and weekend hours to facilitate better vaccine access for essential workers, full-time caregivers or those who face other barriers to accessing vaccines during the weekday.
Mike Wasserman, public health president of the board of supervisors, said the county will heal and “return to normalcy” when herd immunity is attained, which is when 85% of residents have been vaccinated.
He also encouraged county residents to motivate their relatives to get vaccinated.
“Each of you has parents or grandparents in the age group that's allowed to be vaccinated,” Wasserman said during the press conference. “Please call them up and say ‘Hey, have you been vaccinated? Do you want me to register you?’ ”
Cody said the county’s goal is to vaccinate 85% of the eligible population, which is 16 years old and older, by summer.
She said it’s unclear when the county will move to the red tier from the purple tier, which indicates substantial spread of the virus instead of widespread numbers, according to California’s Blueprint for a Safer Economy.
“Of course it depends on the vaccine supply, but you need to set a goal,” Cody said. “There are many variables in the mix, including we know that some of these new variants are circulating in the area and it's difficult to say how that might impact the case rates.”
The public health department announced on Feb. 10 that the South African variant of COVID-19 was identified in Santa Clara County in an immediate release statement.
The release stated two residents returned from international travel in mid-January and experienced symptoms several days later.
The pair followed the county’s 10-day mandatory travel quarantine guidelines for the infectious period.
The only other surrounding case of the variant was in Alameda and is still under investigation, according to the immediate release.
Charlie Faas, San Jose State vice president and chief financial officer, said in a Feb. 11 campuswide email that the university was recently contacted by the county to establish the campus as a COVID-19 vaccination site.
“A cross-divisional Vaccination Planning Support Task Force has been established and is currently in the midst of planning and determining the support efforts necessary to host such a site,” Fass stated.
Cody said while she does have authority to close schools including SJSU, she doesn’t have the authority to reopen schools.
“We have a team that supports schools [and] answers questions,” Cody said. “We're doing everything that we can think of to enable schools to open and we will continue to do that.”
