Gov. Newsom announced Tuesday that dozens of facilities across California will have received hundreds of thousands of doses of the Pfizer vaccine by the end of the day Wednesday.
An estimated 33,150 doses arrived Monday to four facilities, including Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, which began vaccinating its staff Tuesday morning. Another 24 hospitals and long-term care facilities will receive doses today and five more on Wednesday.
Gov. Newsom said these deliveries represent about 60% of Pfizer’s original 327,600 dose commitment to California.
A nurse in Los Angeles became the first Californian to get the vaccine on Monday, after both the FDA and the Western States Scientific Safety Review working group confirmed the vaccine is effective and safe for widespread use.
The governor also said that Pfizer is expected to send an additional 393,000 doses to California next week and Moderna will deliver 672,000 doses of its vaccine by the end of the month, pending approval.
That amounts to nearly 1.4 million vaccine doses scheduled for delivery.
Those doses will all go towards vaccinating healthcare workers and residents and staff at long-term care facilities, who have first priority to get the vaccine. That "Phase 1A" of the state’s vaccination plan encompasses about three million people.
The state is still working to determine who will be in "Phase 1B" and how vaccines will be dispensed among that group, but Gov. Newsom on Tuesday said teachers, farmworkers and grocery store workers are all in the mix.
"It goes without saying there is light at the end of the tunnel," he said Tuesday, as the vaccine is now beginning to be administered up and down the state.
But at the same time, the pandemic is surging at its highest levels yet.
The 14-day positivity rate is now at 10.7%, a significant increase from just two weeks ago when the positivity rate was at 6.9%.
"We haven’t seen the positivity rate that high since the very first weeks of the pandemic, when very few people were being tested," said Gov. Newsom.
32,326 new cases were reported in the state on Monday.
In the Bay Area, the ICU capacity is hovering precariously at 15.8%, just above the 15% threshold to trigger the regional stay-at-home order. While most Bay Area counties have voluntarily adopted the order, once the region falls below 15% the order will be in effect for at least three weeks from that day and could mean the orders are extended beyond what local officials have set.
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