One vaccine against COVID-19 has already been rolled out and others are
on the way in the coming weeks and months, but the virus’s unchecked
spread and nearly full hospitals mean restrictions and closures aren’t
likely to go away soon.
Southern California is under a three-week stay home order, and “we’re
in week two, but I’m not foreseeing that we’ll be able to
get out of the lockdown for (another) month at least,” Orange County
Health Officer Dr. Clayton Chau said Thursday, Dec. 17.
Chau’s remarks came in a webinar on vaccines that included experts
from Hoag Hospital, City of Hope cancer center, MemorialCare Medical Group
and UC Irvine. The same day, Orange County reported the greatest number
patients hospitalized in the entire course of the pandemic. While hospitals
flex their surge plans to open more beds, intentive care unit capacity
for the Southern California region is nearing tapped out.
On Wednesday, the Orange County Health Care Agency leaders told hospitals
in the 911 system not to divert ambulances to other medical centers for
the time being; ambulances typically get sent on to another facility if
the closest or most appropriate hospital is busy and backed up, but that
isn’t sustainable because many hospital emergency rooms are inundated.
While residents shouldn’t delay needed medical care for fear of the
coronavirus or packed hospitals, Chau and others in the webinar asked
the public to remain patient and stay vigilant about health protocols
such as masks, distancing and not gathering.
“This is a longer game. We absolutely need to keep up all the precautionary
measures we have now,” said Jan Hirsch, dean of UCI’s pharmacy
school. “We will get out the other end of the tunnel.”
Meanwhile, health officials are preparing to educate and encourage the
public to get the vaccine once the highest-priority groups have been inoculated,
likely in a few months. Chau said the county will soon make available
a new app that will give users information about vaccines, alert them
when and where to get a shot and remind them when it’s time for
the second dose. (The Pfizer vaccine, which is the first one available,
takes two doses several weeks apart for the greatest effectiveness.)
Asked when the county will reach the 70% vaccination threshold at which
normal activities are expected to resume, Chau said “it depends
on the percentage of folks who are willing to accept the vaccine. Just
because we have the vaccine available doesn’t mean at this time
everybody would want to roll up their sleeve and get the injections.”
But “vaccine hesitancy” may already be declining here.
An OC Health Care Agency community survey in the fall, which got more than
26,000 responses, showed “a significant number” of people
who said they wouldn’t get vaccinated, Chau said. Today, frontline
health care workers are lining up to get their dose, and Orange County
Business Council CEO Lucy Dunn, who moderated the webinar, said many of
the questions viewers submitted were about when the vaccine would be available for them.
“My sense is a survey done in October is not a survey done in December,
and folks are ready to move on,” Dunn said in an interview later
Thursday. “We all want to open sooner and safer, and that’s
what a vaccine is about.”
And by sometime next year, people could have more vaccines to choose from.
Hoag, City of Hope and UC Irvine are all researching different vaccines,
with Hoag potentially just a few months from requesting federal authorization.
Dr. Philip Robinson, Hoag’s director of infection prevention and
hospital epidemiology, said in an interview that second-phase trials involving
hundreds of patients started two weeks ago.
Robinson said Hoag’s version aims to produce two types of immunity.
The earliest COVID-19 vaccines stimulate production of antibodies, which
are “like the archers with their arrows,” and the one Hoag
is testing would generate cell-mediated immunity, which is “like
the tanks and the aircraft carriers,” Robinson said.
Not only could Hoag’s proposed vaccine potentially provide longer-lasting
immunity, it doesn’t need to be kept at ultra-low temperatures and
could be given to patients in a capsule or as a nasal spray.
City of Hope is in Phase 1 trials and hopes to have a vaccine available
for the public by the end of next year, Dr. Harlan Levine, president of
strategy and business ventures, said in the webinar.
While the potential for so many varieties may seem confusing, Robinson
said “you never want to have one vaccine against one pathogen.”
“It may take dozens of vaccines that can be distributed throughout
the world to all these different populations to get control of this crisis
and to keep it controlled for many years to come.”
Levine said knowing about possible future options “should not in
any way interfere with the decision that people are making now, which
is to take the vaccines that are available.”
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