Coronavirus: Oakland Coliseum to be mass vaccination site

Feb. 3—The Oakland Coliseum — home of the Oakland As's baseball team — will be one of two community vaccination sites in California under an initiative announced Wednesday by Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Biden administration.

The pilot sites will be based at the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum and California State University, Los Angeles, and run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Governor's Office of Emergency Services. The effort is part of the Biden administration's effort to establish 100 vaccination sites nationwide in the its first 100 days.

"Equity is the calling of this moment," Newsom said Wednesday morning at a news conference outside the Oakland Coliseum. "The reason this site was chosen was so communities that are often left behind are not left behind in terms of the administration of these vaccines."

The sites are expected to be open to eligible members of the public beginning February 16, Newsom said. Registration for vaccine appointments at the sites will be available through the state's MyTurn scheduling system "in the coming days," the governor's office said. So far, a pilot version of the MyTurn website, at myturn.ca.gov is operating for Los Angeles and San Diego counties.

The Coliseum site will provide 6,000 doses a day, Newsom said. Those will be in addition to the doses that other facilities in California — county health departments, pharmacies and private health care providers like Kaiser and Sutter — are receiving from the federal government.

Each of the two new sites will be paired with two mobile vaccination clinics which can be deployed to multiple locations to boost distribution to areas that otherwise lack sufficient support.

FEMA will provide resources and federal staffing to set up and help run community vaccination centers. Newsom said the two sites will hire people from the local communities to also assist with staffing.

Acting FEMA Administrator Bob Fenton said in a statement that it marks "a significant step forward in the ongoing effort to ensure every American who wants a vaccine will receive a vaccine."

On Wednesday, Newsom said that trends across the state are improving significantly.

The number of daily COVID-19 cases has fallen from about 60,000 a day last month, he noted, to about 10,000 a day now. The number of people hospitalized statewide with COVID-19 has dropped 30% in the last two weeks, and ICU patients have dropped 22% over the same time. The 7-day positivity rate, a key measure of the spread of the virus, has fallen from a peak of 14.3% on Jan. 7 to 6.1% now.

Medical experts say the drop is due in large part to the end of a surge that occurred during Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's when large numbers of people held family gatherings and traveled, spreading the virus to record levels.

California, like other states, has been hampered by a shortage of vaccine doses coming from the federal government. California has tripled the number of vaccines administered in the past few weeks, Newsom said. The pace has gone from about 50,000 shots a day in early January to 150,000 daily doses now.

"That's good, but not good enough," he said.

This week California received 1,060,000 doses of the vaccine. Statewide about 1 million doses are being administered a week, Newsom said.

Most of those shots are going to health care workers and people over 75, although in some areas there is enough supply for people over 65 to be vaccinated. California has 40 million residents. Of those, about 30 million will need to be vaccinated, experts have said, to achieve herd immunity and stop the pandemic. As of Wednesday, 3.8 million doses have been administered in California, according to state statistics.

"There are parts of the state that are already running out of vaccines," Newsom said. "The federal government doesn't have the doses to support states like ours at the scale we all would like to see. We are limited on the basis of supply."

When President Biden took office two weeks ago, White House officials said they were stunned to learn that the Trump administration had no national vaccine distribution plan. And although the Trump administration regularly spoke of stockpiles of the vaccine it had, no such stockpiles existed.

Last week, Biden ordered 200 million more doses from Pfizer and Moderna to boost federal supplies. He set a goal of 100 million shots in his first 100 days, and announced that 100 field clinics would be open around the country, staffed by FEMA and the National Guard. The administration announced that vaccine allocations for states would increase by about 16% starting this week.

"That was complete chaos before President Biden came in," said State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Oakland. "Now we are seeing order and some deliberation. We can all breathe a sigh of relief. This partnership is the perfect example of that."

Skinner said that the state is in a race, however, a point medical leaders have echoed in recent days.

"If we don't get vaccinations in the arms as quick as possible, the virus will mutate. It will change form and it could potentially cause us to lose a lot of the great gains we have made."

Newsom's news conference come as polls this week have shown his approval rating falling during the pandemic, and opponents gathering signatures to try and meet a March 17 deadline to qualify a recall election against him in August.

As of Wednesday morning, California ranked 35th among the 50 states in vaccine doses administered per capita, ahead of other heavily populated states such as Texas, Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania, but behind Florida, Michigan and New York, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many of the states at the top of the list have smaller populations.

The vaccine supply has been improving in recent weeks, Newsom confirmed Wednesday, predicting it will continue to improve as new vaccines, like the Johnson & Johnson vaccine are approved by the FDA in the coming weeks. But Newsom cautioned that with new variants of the virus now spreading, some of which are more contagious, Californians need to not let down their guard, and continue to wear masks and social distance.

"We have to be more vigilant at this moment perhaps than any other moment," he said. "We see the light at the end of the tunnel. In order to get our businesses open, our schools open — which we are committed to doing for in-person instruction — to do that more efficiently, more expeditiously we need to continue to do the good work we have been doing in this state to see that case rate decline."

Reporters asked Newsom about re-opening schools, which has happened already in public schools in dozens of states, but has been stalled in California by an insistence from teacher's unions that every teacher is vaccinated before in-person instruction resumes.

Newsom said state lawmakers are negotiating the issue now and are making progress.

In Santa Clara County, Supervisor Cindy Chavez, San Jose City Councilwoman Magdalena Carrasco and Assemblyman Ash Kalra are planning an event Thursday to urge Newsom to prioritize equitable and proportionate COVID-19 vaccine allocation to counties.

They say the governor and California Department of Public Health should consider the racial populations as well as the numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths, noting that they represent the areas in Santa Clara County hardest hit by COVID-19 with large communities of color and many essential workers.

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