By Eli Walsh, Bay City News Service
More than 29,000 Marin County residents have now received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, representing roughly 11 percent of the county’s population, the county’s public health officer said Tuesday.
According to county data, 34,327 vaccine doses have been administered countywide, Dr. Matt Willis told the county’s Board of Supervisors Tuesday.
That figure includes 5,180 county residents who have received their second dose, which is required for the two vaccines on the market to take effect.
“It’s not happening as quickly as we want,” Willis said of the 11.2 percent of residents who have received at least one vaccine dose. “But it’s important to recognize that that’s a significant fraction of our population.”
Marin County Public Health has administered vaccine doses to roughly 43 percent of the 29,213 county residents that have received at least one dose, according to Willis.
MarinHealth Medical Center, Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health have administered doses to another 21 percent of those who have received at least one dose, while 28 percent of those residents were vaccinated outside of the county.
CVS and Walgreens have administered doses to the remaining 8 percent of vaccinated residents through a federal partnership focusing on nursing home and long-term care facility residents.
As with much of the state and much of the country as a whole, Willis said the main reason more Marin County residents haven’t received a vaccine yet comes down to a lack of supply.
“We are at the ready,” he said. “We have far more operational infrastructure and workers and capacity to vaccinate than we actually haver doses available.”
On Monday, the county announced that employees from multiple departments and public agencies would be reassigned to help hasten the administration of vaccine doses.
Staff members from Marin County Parks and Marin County Fire have already been dispatched to assist at vaccination centers around Marin County.
In addition, the county’s Department of Human Resources is recruiting more county employees for temporary reassignment as disaster service workers.
“We are all dependent on (vaccine) allocations that come to us through the state,” Willis said. “We consistently request extra doses, week after week, because we are moving through so quickly the doses that we receive.”
Willis also noted that Marin County could be one of the Bay Area’s first to move into a less-restrictive tier of the state’s four-tiered reopening system given the county’s relatively low case rate.
Marin County would need to record fewer than seven new cases per day per 100,000 residents and maintain a test positivity rate below 8 percent to move out of the most-restrictive purple tier.
As of Tuesday, the county recorded 14.7 new cases per 100,000 residents and a seven-day average positivity rate of 3.4 percent.
“It’s something that could happen as early as mid-February if our numbers continue to improve,” Willis said.
