Every Tuesday from 7 to 9 p.m., Dr. Phuong Luu eagerly checks her email. The Yuba-Sutter health officer is waiting to see how many COVID-19 vaccine doses she’ll be receiving from the state that week.
“But then once we make that order, we’re not exactly certain when the doses will arrive,” Luu said.
This is why Dr. Luu has created her own cadence – she checks the email and orders the doses, but afterward, she only opens up a number of appointments that can be filled using the amount of the vaccine she has on hand.
“The reason we are very methodical and judicious and prudent about this approach is that we don’t want to open up slots and then we don’t have physically available enough doses and we have to cancel,” Luu said.
One of the biggest challenges for rural, public health departments is that vaccine doses aren’t allocated consistently.
Amy Travis, public information officer of the Glenn County Human Services Agency, said allocations are based on the state’s tier system. She says now, with her county in Phase 1b- Tier 1, allocations are based on county census data for how many residents are 65 and older. It’s a formula that does not favor rural counties, Glenn County said in a recent press release.
“For Glenn County we have a population of just under 30,000 people, and so for the state’s formulation we get one-tenth of one percent of the state’s allocation for vaccines,” Travis said.
This equates to about 300 doses per week.
Interest in the vaccine from the county’s seniors has been very high, Travis said. Glenn County currently has a wait list of 500 people, and 500 others have appointments, Travis said.
Along with receiving a low of number of doses, Travis said getting the Pfizer vaccine to Glenn County has posed additional delays to the process. She said county officials have to make a three hour round trip to Shasta County to pick up any Pfizer doses they receive because they don’t have the ability to receive frozen vaccines directly.
Other North State counties are also seeing more demand than they have vaccines. Lori Beatley, health education coordinator for Plumas County Public Health Agency, said she was surprised at the number of appointments when they opened it up to those 75 years and older in Plumas County.
“We received, I think, within like two hours of opening the registration almost 9,000 phone calls,” Beatley said.
She said the high number of requests, and the fact that the county has been getting vaccines in small, infrequent batches has made them hard to distribute.
“When it trickles in, it makes it very, very difficult for us to do clinics,” Beatley said. “We’re unable to do these mass clinics that some of the Southern California areas have been able to do because we don’t have enough vaccines.”
While Beatley said doses usually come to her county quickly, she said there have been times when an order was halved and shipped at separate times. Plumas County also has seen weeks where they received no vaccine allotments. They’ve even had to borrow doses, Beatley said.
“What happened is that there were some counties that weren’t using them quite as quick and we petitioned the state and asked for more,” Beatley said. “So, we borrowed 200 vaccines, which we do not know if we’re going to have to pay back.”
Kerri Schuette, public information officer for Shasta County’s Health and Human Services Agency echoed Beatley and added that it’s complicated for the state to get so many vaccines out to the many jurisdictions who want them.
“We are taking what we’re given, requesting as much as we can get, and we’re getting people vaccinated as quickly as possible,” Schuette said. “Sometimes one week we’ll get 2,000, another week we’ll get 400 … so I think it’s going to get a lot easier once we have a more predictable supply flowing in.”
Hopefully the near future holds more available vaccines and an easier distribution process for Californians, but it’s also expected to contain more worrisome variants of the virus. According to Yuba-Sutter’s Dr. Luu, preliminary studies published as recently as January show the United Kingdom variant of COVID-19 – known as SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7 – is 50 percent more infectious and possibly 30 percent more deadly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts it will be the dominant strain in the United States by March, Luu said.
“We have about five to six weeks to vaccinate the most vulnerable,” Luu said. “We know from data, national data, that eight out of 10 individuals who died due to COVID, unfortunately, are 65 years and older. And that same data is reflected in Yuba County and Sutter County.”
Considering the data and that we know what’s coming, Luu said California needs to respond by launching an aggressive and efficient effort to vaccinate the state’s most vulnerable.
*A previous version of this story contained a typo that Amy Travis was the public health officer of the Glenn County Human Services Agency. She is the agency's public information officer.