State: Next Few Weeks Critical As Vaccine Arrives

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Even as tens of thousands of doses of vaccine arrive across California, Governor Gavin Newsom and the states health and human services chief Mark Ghaly laid out a dire scenerio for the coming weeks on Tuesday.

Newsom said the state is entering into the most painful period of the coronavirus surge, with some 30K new cases and 150 deaths a day. And they said, modeling shows the pandemic in California will get worse in the coming weeks before it gets better.

The state has ordered 60 refrigerated storage containers and 5 thousand additional body bags as California faces a real time surge in cases and deaths, with projections of a further increase through the end of December.

At the same time they hailed the arrival of the first COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer, and the expected arrival of the Moderna vaccine in the state next week. Already hundreds of thousands of doses have been distributed to dozens of locations statewide, and are being administered to the first of 3 million Californians in the state’s 1A Tier vaccine priority list. This includes healthcare workers, public safety workers, and those in long term care facilities.

And both Newsom and Ghaly said the state is working to insure that millions more doses of the vaccine expected to arrive in the coming weeks will be distributed equitably, and reach the people who need it most urgently.

However, for now the governor stressed that the priority is to slow the further spread of the virus so that the worst projections do not materialize.