COVID Vaccinations in Orange County

Eligibility

• Everyone 65 or older.
• Long-term care residents.
• Health care workers - note that this definition is relatively broad and include nearly everyones in any kind of health care including pharmacy and veterinary medicine.

The next phase is 1B and so those eligible are:

• Those at risk of exposure at work in education and childcare, emergency services and food and agriculture
• Those at risk of exposure at work in transportation and logistics, industrial, commercial, residential and sheltering facilities and services
• Congregate settings with outbreak risk who are incarcerated or without homes

OCHealth recently posted that they expected phase 1B to begin in February. For phases after 1B, the state recently issued guidelines to prioritize people by age rather than occupation, so the eligibility requirements may change.

Availability

Vaccine is currently being distributed in Orange County through the following channels:

Hospitals

While required to follow the state eligibility guidelines, hospitals each have their own policies on which eligible people are allocated shots. The major hospital chains of Kaiser, Provident and UCI receive allocations directly from the state. Kaiser and UCI are offering shots to people who are not their regular patients so people should contact them and get on their priority lists. Kaiser currently only offers shots to people 75 or older but so far, reservations have been readily obtained. These are not listed on their web site. You must call the Kaiser patient line and ask. Hoag has started offering some shots to eligible patients associated with their various entities. Reportedly, shots were offered to randomly selected patients from the Hoag patient list.

Pharmacies

Walgreens and CVS have a federal contract to supply vaccines to residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities. They have advertised that they will offer shots to regular eligible customers but we are not aware of anyone who has received shots from these entities in Orange County.

Community Health Centers

OCHealth has begun mobile health vaccination clinics targeted to vulnerable communities. It is not clear how one gets access to these clinics.

OCHealth SuperPOD sites

OCHealth is offering shots to eligible residents and people who work in the OC at Disneyland and SOCA via reservation. More sites are planned. To receive a reservation, you must register on the web site Othena.com or using the Othena phone app. After registering and completing a short questionnaire you are placed in the waiting room purgatory and told to wait for an email notifying you that reservation slots are available. The site says that slots are prioritized by age and date of registration but the details are not clear and seem to change regularly.

They were briefly offering reservation slots at 8PM but now seem to offer them at random times. It's not clear if slots can taken by any registered user when they become available or only to those who have received an email.

If reservations are available, when you log in, instead of the waiting room you will be taken to a form that lets you choose the date, site, and time and enter with a select. The choices you see as options may already be filled, in which case you will see an error and given the change to make a different selection. Slots fill quickly.

This system clearly favors those who are computer savvy. Those who are not savvy and without the help of a relative or friend should contact the NB Oasis Senior Center for assistance.

Other Counties

Just as Orange County is offering vaccine to people who work in the OC, LA and San Bernardino are offering vaccines to people who work there. They still follow the state eligibility guidelines but have their own processes and priority queues for eligible people.

SuperPOD Leftovers

The Orange County SuperPODs are staffed by volunteers. They need additional medically-trained volunteers. As an incentive to volunteer, each day they offer any leftover vaccine to eligable relatives of the volunteers. There are no guarantees that any vaccine will be left over and candidates must arrive at the SuperPOD site with 20 minutes of the last shot.

Other Sources

We have heard a rumor that people have been given shots by paying concierge doctors. If a shot was obtained from doctor is not part of one of the above groups, people would be wise to get an antibody test to make sure they were really given the vaccine. Purported vaccine is available on the Internet and in Mexico. Caveat Emptor.