LA County To Allow Teachers To Get The COVID-19 Vaccine Soon

LOS ANGELES, CA — Los Angeles County plans to begin offering the coronavirus vaccinations to 1. 3 million teachers and other essential workers within two to three weeks, the public health department announced Wednesday. The county has nowhere near enough vaccines for the seniors already eligible for inoculation, so it remains to be seen how quickly those in the expanded eligibility pool will get vaccinated.

But officials are clearly racing to increase the pace of vaccinations as new variants of the coronavirus surface in California. The first cases of the South African variant were confirmed in Northern California Wednesday while at least 8 cases of the U.K. variant have been confirmed in Los Angeles County. The West Coast variant discovered last month is already widespread in Los Angeles. The rapid emergence of new variants raises questions about the degrees of efficacy that each vaccine has against the changing coronavirus.

In a tandem development, Gov. Gavin Newsom said he will announce a deal for reopening elementary schools this week after acknowledging that vaccines for teachers are part of the negotiations.

"As I said yesterday, I maintain confidence that we will announce a deal as early as Friday with the legislature that will allow our youngest cohorts to return safely to school starting with kindergarten to second grade, and ultimately get cohorts up to sixth grade, at least in that first phase,” Newsom told reporters.

LA's expanded eligibility pool comes the same week that the county reserved the bulk of its vaccination appointments for people in need of their second shot. Only a small fraction of residents aged 65 and over have yet received a COVID-19 vaccine.

In addition to getting the vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control And Prevention recommended residents double mask to protect themselves Wednesday. The CDC found that wearing a cloth mask over a medical mask can reduce coronavirus exposure by 95 percent. The advice comes as hundreds continue to die every day in Los Angeles, which has seen more than 1,000 people die every week this year. Though cases are dropping, Los Angeles continues to be the epicenter of the state's outbreak, accounting for 18,500 of the state's 45,000 coronavirus fatalities. California's death toll Tuesday made it the hardest-hit state in the nation although the per capita rate is lower than in many other states.

Los Angeles County reported another 141 deaths due to the coronavirus Wednesday and another 3,434 cases, raising the total number of cases from throughout the pandemic to 1,155,309.

The number of new cases continues to fall dramatically putting Los Angeles County on track to enter another tier of reopenings within weeks. With additional reopenings within sight, multiple industries, interest groups, and unions are jockeying for their workers to get vaccine priority.

Newsom has increased pressure on health officials to open up the vaccination pool to teachers, childcare workers, police, and food and agriculture workers - all see as essential to the safe reopening of the state.

Representatives from an array of sectors have been pressuring state and local officials to make the vaccines available, creating what Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer conceded was a difficult process of deciding who will come first. The issue of getting teachers vaccinated has become a major issue in recent days amid pushes by Newsom and some local officials to get students back in classrooms. But Los Angeles Unified teachers and the superintendent have said teachers and staff need to be vaccinated before that can happen, despite the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying otherwise.

It would take several weeks to vaccinate all of LA's 1.3 million essential workers. If Los Angeles schools were to wait until all staffers are immunized, classrooms may have time to reopen before the summer break.

The county on average has been receiving only about 200,000 doses of the medication a week. With vaccine supply remaining that low and the field of eligible residents expanding, getting an appointment for a shot could become dramatically more difficult.

The expansion of the vaccine eligibility will occur even as the county continues administering shots to the currently eligible populations -- health care workers, residents and staff of nursing and long-term care facilities and residents 65 and over. Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer noted that to date, only 20% of residents aged 65 and over have received at least one dose of the medication.

"We're trying to follow along with what's happening across the state," Ferrer said. "... In some counties, smaller counties or smaller cities, they've been able already to start vaccinating in those sectors, and they also have not completed vaccinations for all of their folks who are 65 and older.

"At this point, we'd like to make significant inroads into getting people who are older vaccinated," she said. "... Our hope is that over these next two weeks you're going to see that number go way up in terms of the number of older people who are getting vaccinated. But also it's an acknowledgment that we do have to get started with some of our essential workers. It's gonna be really difficult to wait weeks and weeks and weeks until we complete an entire sector before we move on."

Ferrer pointed out Wednesday that 1,700 schools opened last fall in the county with limited numbers of students, and another 300 are operating under a waiver program that allowed younger students to return to campuses, and "we saw very few outbreaks" of the virus, and those that did occur were small and easily contained.

As always Ferrer encouraged residents to follow health orders in order for Los Angeles to safely reopen.

"Our optimism around this decrease is cautious," she said. "The number is still more than three times the average daily case rates we were reporting in September. And also, we're at a time of the year when people may be more tempted to gather. It's our hope that all residents are choosing to not get together with people from outside their household or to travel to celebrate the Lunar New Year, Valentine's Day or Presidents Day."

City News Service and Patch Staffers Kat Schuster and Paige Austin contributed to this report.