Coronavirus vaccines arrive in South Lake Tahoe

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. - The overnight snowstorm brought more than powder as the first shipment of the Pfitzer-BioNTech vaccine for the coronavirus arrived in South Lake Tahoe at Barton Hospital.

El Dorado County received a total of 975 doses with about five hundred doses shipped to South Lake Tahoe Thursday, Marshall Hospital in Placerville will receive theirs on Sunday. The local doses will be administered to Barton's healthcare workers and skilled nursing residents, beginning Friday, December 17.

Moderna got approval for their COVID-19 vaccine from the Food & Drug Administration's Advisory Panel on Thursday, paving the way for FDA approval possibly as early as Friday, December 18. If approved, 2200 doses of the Moderna brand vaccine should be in El Dorado County on or about December 22, 2020.

Both El Dorado County and Carson City Health and Human Services are developing a roll out plan for next tiers.

The first doses of vaccine follow state protocol and will be distributed as follows:

Phase 1a includes people at risk of exposure through their work in any role in direct health care or long-term care settings. As such, Barton Health and Marshall Medical will receive the first allocation of Pfizer vaccine.

The first tier within Phase 1a includes the following groups:

Acute care, psychiatric and correctional facility hospitals
Skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, and similar settings for older or medically vulnerable individuals
Also, in concordance with ACIP, residents in these settings
Paramedics, EMTs and others providing emergency medical services
Dialysis centers

It is hard to predict when Phase 1a recipients will be completed the the County said they are hopeful that everyone in that phase will be completed with first dose by the end of January, 2021.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two doses to be fully effective. The manufactured doses should not be interchanged, i.e., if your first dose is from Pfizer, the second needs to be from Pfizer. The second dose should be administered three weeks after the first dose.

The next phases have not been established at this time as officials are focusing on the logistics of Phase 1a at this time.

A fact sheet has been created on El Dorado County's website, https://www.edcgov.us/Government/hhsa/Pages/EDCCOVID-19-Vaccine.aspx.

All photos were provided by Barton Health.