COVID Vaccine: Mayor London Breed Says San Francisco Public Health Will Run Out Of Doses By Thursday
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- Mayor London Breed on Tuesday said that the San Francisco Department of Public Health would run out of its current supply of COVID vaccine doses in two days during her update on the city's response to the pandemic.
The mayor said that San Francisco is still seeing 333 new cases per day, but the case numbers seem to be increasing at a slower rate, with the reproductive rate at 1.06 but gradually inching down.
"Most importantly, more and more people are getting vaccinated every single day, especially our seniors who are the most vulnerable to getting sick and dying from COVID" said Breed. "This should give us all some very real hope. It's going to be a long road, but the road will begin to lighten."
Breed went on to outline some of the progress the city has made as far as administering the COVID vaccine to San Francisco residents. The SF Department of Public Health has received 31,665 doses and administered nearly half of those doses (15,545), with 12,920 residents receiving their first dose and 2,625 receiving both first and second doses.
Breed said that the city's utilization rate is at about 49.1%, which is above of the national average. The remaining vaccine doses currently allocated to San Francisco have been scheduled to be administered this week to individuals receiving either their first or their second dose.
Breed said that the city's Department of Public Health would run out of available doses to administer this Thursday if the supply is not replenished, but noted that the city did not have specific data for each public health provider (Sutter Health, Kaiser Permanente and Dignity Health) regarding total numbers received and administered.
"The Department of Public Health will run out our existing vaccine system by this Thursday," Breed said. "We do not currently have this level of data from our private health care partners, but we are working with them to get it."
In total, Breed said San Francisco has received 102,825 doses of vaccine, with 28,501 San Franciscans having received at least one dose and 6,367 having received the second dose. That group is largely made up of healthcare workers living in San Francisco.
Breed said that approximately 210,000 San Franciscans made up the Tier 1A group to first receive the vaccine, 80,000 to 90,000 were healthcare workers with about 11,000 in-home care workers and 110,000 residents age 65 and over.
The mayor also announced that the city had launched a COVID vaccination data site that would provide information on who has received the shots so far.
Despite the challenges being presented by the vaccine shortage, the mayor said the City College of San Francisco vaccination site would still open as planned later this week. On January 15, Breed announced plans to open that site as well as two additional mass vaccination sites at the Moscone Center in SoMa and at the SF Market in the Bayview District.
"To be clear, when I say 'run out by Thursday,' we're specifically talking about what the city has control over by the Department of Public Health. We are definitely planning to continue to move forward to open the City College site because we are working with other healthcare providers like Dignity, like Kaiser, like CPMC, because we know they are still distributing the vaccine," said Breed. "But we are prepared so that when we receive the doses, we don't want to wait around, we want to get them into the arms of individuals who we know need them as quickly as possible."
San Francisco Public Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax also highlighted how his department was being impacted by the vaccine shortage in his comments.
"Right now our challenge is the lack of vaccine. All the vaccines allocated to the San Francisco Department of Public Health have either been administered or are earmarked for those who have been scheduled to receive a first dose and those who need a second dose," said Colfax.
He also noted that his department's supply was additionally being affected by issues with some vaccine recipients having allergic reactions to the Moderna vaccine.
"The Department of Public Health is paused on using 8,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine out of an abundance of caution and guidance from the state," said Colfax. "As of today we have not received any replacement doses. This will have an impact on the city's ability to complete already scheduled vaccinations."
While San Francisco has not had as many casualties as other parts of California and the country from COVID, Colfax also addressed the terrible toll the disease has had.
"As one of the first cities in the nation to shelter-in-place due to COVID-19, we understood what we were asking of all of us: hardship and sacrifice," said Colfax. "While this third surge has been the worst the Bay Area has experienced, we have avoided the worst of the pandemic. Indeed, today the numbers in the United States are hard to comprehend. Who would have thought a year ago, that we would nearly have 400,000 people in this country dead of this virus? That is sad, sobering and it is tragic."
Dr. Colfax also addressed the new variants of the virus that have surfaced.
"This is going to be part of this pandemic," said Colfax. "As we see variants emerge, we're just going to have to learn more about them, but also ensure that we take the prevention activities that we know to slow the spread of the virus."
The mayor also said that, given declining hospitalization rates, San Francisco would hopefully be able to come out of the current stay-at-home order soon.
"If that trend continues, I expect we would move out of the stay-at-home order sooner than if those cases continue to skyrocket," said Breed. "I don't have a specific date, but right now I would say the trend is in a positive direction."
Earlier, Mayor Breed noted that the city is continuing to provide support for those people who get sick with COVID and need to take time off work to recover and isolate with San Francisco's Right to Recover program. So far, $4.5 million has been provided by the city for this program, helping 3,200 San Francisco residents, with more funding on the way, Breed said.
"Today, we're allocating another six million dollars to fund this program going forward, bringing the total support to $10.5 million," Breed explained, saying the money was coming from the city's healthcare ordinance security fund.
