Vaccine ramp-up puts pressure on COVID-19 testing and follow-up in California | National

The effort involved trade-offs. Removed about one-third of all government-run operations, at least temporarily, when the City of Los Angeles completed COVID testing at Dodger Stadium and closed another test site to assist staff at the new vaccine center. Did. Tests in Los Angeles County — The largest county in the United States with a population of 10 million and one of the largest COVID hotspots.

Sites run by cities, counties, or states account for just over one-third of all COVID tests in LA County, said Dr. Clemens Hong, who heads the county’s testing operations.

Poor testing capacity can increase booking latency. In other words, an infected person may be exposed to another person for a long time before knowing that he or she is infected with the virus.

But Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said it hasn’t happened so far. Los Angeles County has called the infection rate “perfect timing” since Dodger Stadium switched to vaccination, and the demand for testing has dropped from half to two-thirds, the mayor said Thursday. “We meet our needs — we actually exceed them.”

Still, he admitted that the renovation of the stadium was a risk. It is a risk taken by the city because “the vaccine prevents this, cures it, and finally resolves it.”

Many health professionals agree that prioritizing vaccination over testing is the right thing to do.

“The best way to get out of our current crisis is with masks, daily contacts and vaccines, so it makes sense to create more access points for vaccination, even with a few tests. “It makes sense,” said senior fellow Dr. Bob Koffel. Former member of the state’s COVID-19 Testing Task Force at the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics at the University of Southern California.

However, the number of cases of COVID-19 remains high despite a recent drop from peak levels, threatening to encourage new outbreaks of viral variants, and some public health officials have tested. It states that it is just as important as the effort to contain and ultimately curb. Pandemic.

And as vaccination campaigns gain momentum, testing could prove even more important in the coming months, as tests could prove a valuable tool for assessing how well vaccines are working. ..

“Given the number of people with COVID, it’s hard to say that vaccines are more important at this point,” Hong said. “It’s hard to balance the two because you really only need a lot of both.”

Balancing vaccination with testing and other COVID-19-related tasks is an important challenge for California and national public health authorities. These features take advantage of many of the same resources, especially the staff needed for management and records management.

In the field of vaccination, it is essential to keep good records in order to plan daily how many vaccinations will be given from the freezer. Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said:

Sara Bosse, director of public health in Madera County, said the current budget year for counties throughout the state to cover the costs of facilities, security, data entry staff, clinicians, and other costs to set up vaccination sites. Said he demanded $ 400 million from Newsam. Give a shot and be aware of harmful side effects. They are also asking for $ 280 million to test COVID-19 and $ 440 million for contact tracing and non-group housing to protect people susceptible to COVID-19.

“I think many counties are prioritizing vaccination. Based on the resources they have, they can derive from different parts of the COVID response, such as contact tracing and testing,” Bosse said. Stated. According to her, the money will help county health officials avoid “difficult decisions that must be drawn from one part of the COVID response to support the next.”

There may also be federal government support along the way. President Joe Biden has announced plans to set up 100 federal-backed vaccination centers and allocate $ 50 billion to expand testing.

In Madera County, a poor rural area of ​​160,000 people extending from the Central Valley to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the state has taken over most of the COVID tests, allowing the county to focus resources on vaccination, Bosse said.

A major challenge in that regard is to secure well-trained healthcare professionals to operate vaccination sites. The county recently heard from 85 trained clinicians volunteering for a vaccine effort, “This will be a game changer for us.”

According to Garsetti, there are ways to enhance mobile testing by adding test capabilities elsewhere in Los Angeles. He was considering a test site at Pierce University in the San Fernando Valley, but “it doesn’t seem necessary to open,” the mayor said.

Cities, counties, and states are also discussing potential partnerships to expand testing at Exposition Park in southern Los Angeles.

In San Diego County, we expect health authorities to face challenges due to the competition for staffing between vaccination and testing, and they are hiring to meet that need, and county health and welfare. Sarah Sweeney, a spokesman for the agency, said. The county has not yet changed the testing site to a vaccination site, but she said she hopes to do so after the vaccine supply has increased.

Health officials in San Bernardino County have promised to maintain tests at current doses despite increased vaccination, said Corwin Porter, director of public health. But he admitted that doing both at the same time was a “difficulty” because “there weren’t enough vaccines and not enough staff.”

The county holds weekly employment events and works with multiple partners looking for additional resources. “We try not to pull anything out of testing or contact tracing,” Porter said.

Beyond resource issues, another major challenge faces health authorities. “There is a problem of dispersal of attention,” said Hong of LA County. “There are two big things to deal with right now. There are three, including contact tracing. I think we have to think twice about our strategy.”

According to Rutherford of the University of California, San Francisco, this can take months if a large area of ​​the population is vaccinated, and the test dose can drop sharply.

“Once we get vaccinated, we no longer have hundreds of thousands of tests a day,” he said. “You’ll be testing thousands of people and finding dozens of cases.”

Meanwhile, LA County is likely to add questions to people about vaccination status on its test appointment website, Hong said. “This way we can track what is happening to the vaccinated people.”

An ongoing outbreak of COVID-19 may require more testing, especially in poor-colored communities that have been hit hardest by pandemics — and that vaccination hesitation is likely to become more widespread. Hong said. “The bottom line is that the tests never go away.”

(Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. This is an editorial independent program of Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. This story is published by KHN, which publishes California Healthline. Created by. An editorial independent service of the California Healthcare Foundation.)

(C) 2021 Kaiser Health News

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