California works to track cases of COVID among the vaccinated
As more and more Californians get their coronavirus shots, the state is trying to track cases of people who contract COVID-19 after they have been vaccinated, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday.
“I’m waiting for that data,” Newsom said during a vaccination event in Alameda County. “As soon as I have it, I want to make it public.”
Nationwide, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have identified 5,800 cases of breakthrough infections among vaccinated people, agency spokeswoman Jasmine Reed said in an email. They represent a tiny fraction of the 75 million people in the United States who are fully vaccinated, Reed said. The agency is not currently providing a state-by-state breakdown of the cases.
“All of the available vaccines have been proven effective at preventing severe illness, hospitalizations, and deaths,” Reed wrote in an email. “However, like is seen with other vaccines, we expect thousands of vaccine breakthrough cases will occur even though the vaccine is working as expected.”
The breakthrough cases were found among people of all ages eligible for vaccination, Reed said. Nearly two-thirds of the identified cases were in women, 29% of the cases were asymptomatic, and just 7% were known to be hospitalized. Seventy-four of the people died, representing about 1% of the breakthrough cases, according to the CDC data.
Newsom said he and Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly are particularly interested in determining how many of the roughly 2,300 coronavirus patients in California hospitals were vaccinated before they contracted COVID-19.
Newsom said problems collecting vaccine data from the state’s disparate network of health care providers is making it difficult to track breakthrough infections. State and local officials have been identifying lags in the state’s vaccination data since the state started inoculating Californians in large numbers earlier this year.
Data lags were a big reason California hired insurance company Blue Shield to oversee a new centralized vaccine distribution system. In mid-March, Blue Shield CEO Paul Markovich said some providers’ vaccine data was still taking up to six days to reach the state, which resulted in vaccine shortages for some providers. To fix that problem, the company has been moving counties and providers onto the state’s MyTurn vaccination platform to schedule appointments and log vaccinations.
“Having a six-day lag in knowing which doses were administered where is a big, big problem when it comes to knowing how much inventory is out there versus how much has been used,” he told The Bee last month. “The big thing we’re doing is moving everybody onto this performance management system so we know same day what doses have been administered.”
Thursday is the first day every Californian over age 16 is eligible to get a vaccine, although some health care providers had already begun vaccinating people in that age group to use up excess supply.
So far, California has administered more than 24 million vaccine doses. More than 39% of Californians have received their first vaccine dose and more than 23% are fully vaccinated, according to state data.
On Tuesday, California stopped administering the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine after federal health officials recommended states pause administering the vaccine while a small number of cases where people developed blood clots are investigated.
That caused some providers in California to scramble to reschedule appointments, but Newsom, who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine two weeks ago, said that the pause won’t significantly slow down the state’s vaccination progress in the long term.