How state distribution channels impacted vaccine availability in Monterey County.

How state distribution channels impacted vaccine availability in Monterey County.

Good afternoon. 

Pam Marino here, after a back-and-forth on Twitter with some folks who think Monterey County has done a poor job with the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines. I pushed back a bit. 

It’s not so much that I was defending the county as the accusations don’t jibe in my mind, after watching the dribs and drabs of vaccine doses coming here from the state for the first couple of months. Blaming the county for not enough vaccinations is a bit like blaming the spigot for not providing enough water when the water company is controlling the flow.

The sense that Monterey County was getting shortchanged began in late January, when local officials noticed that some other counties were receiving more doses—specifically, other counties that have multi-county health care systems, also known as Multi-County Entities or MCEs, like Kaiser, Sutter Health and Dignity Health. 

The Monterey County Board of Supervisors looked at the state’s then-policy of allocating off the top of the state’s vaccine supply a portion for MCEs, then dividing up what was left to counties. County officials reasoned that counties with MCEs would wind up with more doses. The board sent a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom on Jan. 28 expressing concerns that the county was getting shortchanged, in part because of the MCE policy.

It was hard to pin down and confirm the data back in January. The state data was unreliable early on. (It has gotten better.) I dug into it this week to see the latest by comparing Monterey County to Santa Cruz County, which has three MCEs.

According to the Los Angeles Times Covid-19 vaccine tracker, Monterey County—with a population of 434,000 people—has administered 116,523 doses of the vaccine. That works out to 26,897 doses per 100,000 residents. Santa Cruz County, with a population of 273,000, has administered 119,879 doses, or 43,789 per 100,000 residents. 

Some might look at that data and say Santa Cruz County is doing something right and Monterey County is not. Except that the Santa Cruz County Health Department reports that they have distributed just 64,609 vaccines, or 55,270 less than all vaccines administered in the county.

Where did those remaining 55,270 doses come from? Most of them came from Kaiser, Sutter and Dignity. Santa Cruz County also currently has an OptumServe mass vaccination site.

In mid-February, the state announced it was going to discontinue its policy of sending vaccines to MCEs first. On Feb. 23, the state also released more vaccines to agricultural counties. Overnight, Monterey County went from receiving around 3,200 does per week to over 10,000 per week. Then on March 2, the state announced more revisions to its distribution, including prioritizing zip codes where Covid has hit hardest.

Overall, California has a long way to go. It continues to lag behind other states in administering vaccines. The New York Times tracker has it at 29th in the nation, having given 23 percent of its residents at least one shot. (That’s the same percentage as all of the U.S.; among the states, New Mexico is in the top position, at 31 percent of adults vaccinated.)

In Monterey County, the Health Department reports that 22 percent of those 16 and above have received at least one shot, so we’re tracking with the state overall. 

More vaccines are coming, and they’re coming faster than they were a month ago. For now, we just have to be patient—and keep protecting ourselves and the community until more of us can get vaccinated. 

-Pam Marino, staff writer, pam@mcweekly.com