As the vaccine rollout and the availability of appointments continues to be a source of frustration for some Bay Area residents, the governor on Friday indicated that he believes everyone in the state should be eligible to get a vaccine by late April.
Newsom gave the timeline of "five and a half weeks" while answering questions during a news conference Friday, as KRON4 reports, saying that he thinks all the eligibility phasing will be complete by then and vaccines can be made available to all Californians over the age of 16. That would but us in the last week of April, which may or may not be optimistic given hiccups with the supply chain — and with several major healthcare networks and the Oakland Coliseum site having to stop giving first doses while they try to catch up on second doses.
In addressing a question about whether the vaccine equity effort — in which 40% of California's
"We administered 1.2 million doses in the past 72 hours," Newsom said. "We received just 1.7 million last week for the entire week. We're through a large percentage of that in just three days... As we we get more manufactured supply, we'll make more abundant that distribution... We anticipate within five and a half weeks... [we can] eliminate all the tiering, so to speak, and make available vaccines to everybody across the spectrum because supply will exponentially increase."
The infrastructure for giving tens of thousands of doses per day appears to be there at Bay Area sites including at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco, and at City College of San Francisco, but supply has so far hampered that process. Once all frontline workers, the elderly, and those with serious underlying health conditions are able to get appointments in the coming few weeks, we should hopefully see "scarcity frame" with tiered phases, as Newsom says, go away, and it will just be a race to find appointments where you can.
Earlier this week, Solano County became the first in the Bay Area to open up vaccines to everyone age 50 and over.
But elsewhere in the region, reports of canceled or impossible-to-find appointments continue due to lack of supply.