These Sacramento COVID-19 vaccine centers, with some in ‘secret’ locations, open this week

After weeks of limited inoculations, several major private health care providers in Sacramento and the Central Valley say they are ready this week to ramp up their coronavirus vaccine shot-giving efforts by opening large-scale inoculation centers around the valley, some in unadvertised locations.

The effort — a race against time as new COVID-19 strains crop up — is being described by health care officials as the biggest mass health initiative in decades.

Sutter Health system, with 1 million Sacramento Valley-area patients, reported on Monday it is expecting to be able to vaccinate more than 3,000 patients per day for now at the three pop-up sites in the valley. The health system plans to increase that number significantly in the coming weeks, as more doses arrive.

One site is in an industrial area of west Roseville, another near Costco in the Cal Expo area of Sacramento and a third is in Modesto.

“This is the largest public health response many of us have seen in our professional careers,” said Branden Nelson, director of clinical operations for primary care for the Sutter Medical Foundation in the Sacramento region.

Sutter officials said they’ve pushed to get the pop-up sites open because their network of 200 clinics in the greater Sacramento and Northern California region is not equipped to handle the large volumes of people who are expected to flow through daily. Those smaller clinics, however, are also doing COVID-19 inoculations.

The health provider’s Roseville vaccine site, in an empty office building, has 30 injection stations, flanked by workstations on wheels, which will be used to check patients in, record their data and assign them a second injection date. The site will start though with 15 injection stations open.

Sutter officials are not disclosing the exact locations to the general public, they say, because they don’t want people to show up without an appointment hoping for a shot. Nevertheless, guards at the Roseville site reported last week some people were showing up asking if the site was offering injections.

Sutter is taking reservations on its members’ online health site, focused for now on patients who are 75 and older.

Historic and worrisome moment

Other entities, including UC Davis Health and Dignity’s Mercy Medical Group, are opening the doors to people age 65 and up. Kaiser is focusing initially on patients 75 and up.

UC Davis Health plans to open a major inoculation center for its patients in Roseville as well this week, likely on Wednesday. Shots there also will be by reservation only. UC Davis officials have said they hope to open two more sites if vaccine supplies expand.

Dignity Health announced it has ramped up its shot program, and expected to vaccinate 2,400 patients at clinics this past Saturday in Citrus Heights, midtown Sacramento, Elk Grove and Folsom. Dignity will do weekly vaccination events, officials said.

The moment, health officials say, is historic and worrisome.

Even as health companies ramp up their vaccination efforts, they face weekly uncertainty about how many doses the two currently approved manufacturers, Pfizer and Moderna, will be able to produce and ship on a weekly basis.

Meanwhile, several new strains of the virus are being detected globally that are more easily spread than the original COVID-19 strain, and that appear to be somewhat more resistant to the vaccines than the original strain.

Epidemiologists studying the new strains say the current vaccines and a potential new vaccine from Johnson & Johnson remain largely effective against those strains, but don’t entirely eliminate the chance that a vaccinated person could catch the virus anyway.

The Biden administration last week announced plans to help vaccine manufacturers produce and distribute more doses in the coming months, aiming for 100 million nationally in 100 days.

Health care providers strained

But it has become clear from the slow start, both nationally as well as in California and in local counties, that the mass vaccine program launch is placing a strain on health systems and officials.

Dr. John Gisla, a medical director at Dignity Health, said professionals with his company are doing double duty.

“Our staff and doctors are working overtime during the week to organize vaccination clinics and schedule patients, and on the weekends running the clinics to provide vaccines to our patients,” Gisla said in a statement to The Sacramento Bee. “This is in addition to their ongoing work providing acute and chronic disease management to our patients.

“We consider this work to be crucial towards finally ridding our communities of the COVID-19 virus, and returning our families to a sense of normalcy. It is a massive endeavor, and we are working to deploy vaccinations as quickly as possible, including standing up community clinics, so I can’t thank our staff and doctors enough for going above and beyond to ensure this gets done.”

At Sutter Health, clinical operations director Nelson said his group could use more doses. “If our state and county partners are able to get us more product, we will take that and we will run with it,” he said. “This is what we do.”

Doses come into local counties on a weekly basis, landing on a variety of doorsteps. The Sacramento County Health Department is getting 15,000 doses this week. It will use some at Cal Expo and send others to pharmacies and to health clinics it partners with for distribution.

Other shipments go directly to CVS and Walgreens as part of a federal program to do vaccinations in skilled nursing homes.

Sutter, UC Davis, Dignity and Kaiser Permanente also get doses, first for their employees and now for their patients.

UC Davis Health started dosing elderly patients two weeks ago at its central Sacramento campus, averaging 1,000 shots a day, now including people age 65 and up who have UC Davis Health as their primary care provider. UC Davis will open a second vaccination site on Wednesday at its Roseville clinic on Douglas Boulevard starting Monday, by appointment only.

“We have vaccinated over 22,000 people total, including (10,000-plus) patients, our health care workers, and community health care workers who are not part of a health system (from lists provided by Sacramento County Public Health),” UC Davis said in an email to The Bee.

Vaccine supply still not sufficient

UC Davis Health with expand to more locations and younger age groups when it feels it has a stable weekly flow of doses.

“This is completely dependent upon the vaccine supply,” the health care company said. “If we are able to secure more doses, we will open more locations around Sacramento and we will keep our clinics hours open longer.

“We believe we could vaccinate two or three times as many patients if we had the vaccine doses to support such a program.”

At Kaiser Permanente, officials said last week their vaccine supply is “currently limited and unpredictable.” As of the beginning of the week, Kaiser had vaccinated about 2.5% of its 12.4 million members.

“We understand and apologize for the frustration some of our members have encountered with availability of vaccination appointments,” Kaiser said in a statement to The Bee.

Kaiser officials said they were focusing initial inoculations on patients age 75 and older. “Once contacted by Kaiser Permanente, these members will be able to schedule their appointments online or through the Appointment and Advice Call Center.”

But Kaiser laments it is not getting the number of doses it would like.

“In Northern California, we have more than 270,000 members older than 75 and yet we are only receiving an average of 25,000 doses per week, which is also being used to vaccinate the health care worker population. Our allocations are not matching the percentage of the eligible population for which we are responsible. We look forward to receiving even more vaccine in the weeks to come, and we are prepared to deliver much more than we are currently receiving.

“We have been vaccinating members 75 years or older, and will be reaching out to that community proactively in the coming days. We follow state guidelines and prioritize those patients who are at an increased risk of mortality or other severe disease, as well as those who reside in vulnerable communities. Once contacted by Kaiser Permanente, these members will be able to schedule their appointments online or through the Appointment and Advice Call Center.”

Dignity Health Mercy Medical Group has begun vaccinating people age 65 and up as well, by appointment only.

“We will be giving 2,400 shots this week, and even more in the following weeks as vaccine supply allows,” spokeswoman Yessenia Anderson said.

But the medical group is urging patience.

“We request that our patients not call us to try to schedule a vaccination appointment at this time,” Anderson wrote. “Right now our process is as follows — if you have a Mercy Medical Group primary care physician (PCP), your doctor’s office will reach out to you when you become eligible for the vaccine, in accordance with local and state guidelines, and when we have the adequate volume of doses. In the meantime, patients can continue to check in for updates on our website.”