OC Receives More Than 83K COVID-19 Vaccine Doses In Single Day
SANTA ANA (CBSLA) — Orange County received more than 83,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses Thursday, allowing officials to catch up on canceled appointments and keep large-scale county-run sites open.
"Disney now has enough vaccine to continue operating, [Soka University] will continue to operate without closure and the [Anaheim] Convention Center will continue to operate without closures," Orange County CEO Frank Kim said. "Unless there's a weather issue, we have enough vaccine to get through what we need to do."
The super site at Disneyland, which was closed due to Santa Ana winds, was expected to reopen Friday, though Kim said the county would have to focus on those who were scheduled to receive their second doses last week.
"We're going to prioritize those second doses," he said. "We need to catch up."
The only site that remains closed was the one at Santa Ana College, which was expected to reopen in the middle of next week.
The county not only received last week's shipment of Moderna vaccine doses, but also this week's Pfizer and Moderna vaccine doses as well as another 16,000 Moderna doses that were not expected until Friday.
Some of the doses will go to stand-alone hospitals and to the Orange County Board of Education for educators. About 20% will go to the county government, which will be split between stand-alone hospitals and CalOptima — a program serving residents in need. The rest of the vaccines will go to larger healthcare system providers.
"We're basically playing catch up now," Orange County Supervisor Lisa Bartlett said. "But we are on an extremely good trajectory at this point. Our numbers are looking good... We may be one of the first counties to go from purple to red tier."
But Bartlett said that at this rate, the county will not finish vaccinating elderly residents for another nine months.
"Even though 83,000 doses sounds like a lot, we vaccinated an all time high the other day of 11,600 people in our county, which is great," she said. "But when you consider 83,000 doses, that won't even last a week."
And with Moderna and Pfizer making more vaccines, Bartlett is calling on the state to get its numbers right.
"The state receives its vaccine doses based on what it reports to the federal level," she said. "We've got to get the state database accurate and complete, so that we can get that to the federal level and make sure that we get the vaccination doses that our state needs."
On Thursday, the county reported 174 newly confirmed COVID-19 cases and 41 deaths, bringing countywide totals to 245,634 cases and 3,889 deaths.
Hospitalizations remained at 515 Thursday, and intensive care unit admissions rose slightly from 151 to 160. The county's seven-day average test positivity rate was 5.4%.
(© Copyright 2021 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. City News Service contributed to this report.)
