CDC approval of COVID-19 vaccine will make 37,000 kids eligible in Sonoma County

Federal approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for children aged 5-11 appears closer than ever, and acceptance can’t come soon enough for some Sonoma County parents.

“People are very excited, because they’ve seen what COVID has done to their family members,” said Dr. Urmila Shende, the county’s vaccine chief and a practicing pediatrician. “Many of them are just waiting for vaccine to be here, particularly as the holidays come upon us.”

Parents of children with chronic medical conditions are particularly eager, Shende added. “Because they have been working hard to try protect their children all this time,” she said. “And it’s exhausting. It’s tough, and it really makes parents very anxious.”

Final approval could come as soon as Nov. 2-3, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention convene an advisory meeting on the subject. The federal government has promised to begin shipping vaccine doses to about 25,000 pediatric or primary care offices, thousands of pharmacies and hundreds of schools and rural health clinics across the nation within hours of that approval.

The Biden administration is stressing that the delivery of doses to younger children will look much different from the fraught early stages of the coronavirus vaccine rollout, as the U.S. now has ample supplies of Pfizer to vaccinate the estimated 28 million American kids who are about to become eligible.

That number includes roughly 37,000 young people in Sonoma County.

Another shift in the vaccination campaign: This stage will be handled in doctors’ offices and community pop-ups rather than the mass sites that defined most previous stages.

Sonoma County health officials, seeking to serve families that lack convenient or affordable access to health care, will work with the county’s office of education to set up vaccination events at schools. They will give priority to campuses in areas with high rates of COVID-19, low vaccination rates and large numbers of English-language learners.

These clinics will be open evenings and weekends to better accommodate families unable to take time off work to get vaccinated, and will also accept teens and adults seeking a first or second dose.

The Sonoma County Office of Education is setting concrete goals for this. Dr. Steve Herrington, county superintendent of schools, wants 25% of the 37,000 soon-to-be-eligible children vaccinated by Dec. 1, 50% by Jan. 31, 2022, and 70% by Feb. 28 of next year.

“Vaccinating children … is the best way to ensure that classrooms stay open,” Herrington said in a prepared statement. “In-person instruction is not only crucial for our children’s education, but also for their social and emotional well-being. After all of the sacrifices our community has already endured during the pandemic, we don’t want any of our students to miss another day of school.”

Since Sonoma County classrooms began reopening in late July, education officials said, 586 students and 67 school staffers have tested positive for COVID-19, though the numbers have fallen since peaking in late August. The majority of the cases were in elementary grades, and 10% percent of them — 64 students and five staff members – have been linked to on-campus transmission.

Kate Pack, the county’s lead epidemiologist, calls that last figure a conservative estimate.

“Those are the cases in which contact tracing was performed, a positive case was verified on campus and then those contacts we were following became positive themselves,” Pack said. “There are other instances where, through interviews, people may say that they believe they could’ve gotten it on campus, but we don’t have a verified link of transmission.”

Neither county health nor SCOE representatives could provide data on how many days of school have been missed in 2021 due to positive test cases.

Young people have proved to be much more susceptible to the delta variant than to previous iterations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Children accounted for 25.5% of United States COVID cases during the week ending Oct. 14, even though they make up only 22.2% of the population. And while few kids wind up hospitalized for COVID-19, they are more likely to be asymptomatic carriers than adults, putting those around them at risk.

The young are not immune from severe outcomes, either. Since March, about one in four children hospitalized for the virus has required intensive care. And virus-related COVID hospitalizations among children and adolescents rose nearly fivefold between late June and mid-August, according to a CDC study, timing that coincides with delta’s spread.

Unvaccinated kids were 10 times as likely as the vaccinated to wind up in the hospital.

Among Sonoma County residents of all ages, the unvaccinated have seen a hospitalization rate seven times higher than that of the vaccinated, Pack said. During the summer delta surge, they were closer to 14 times as vulnerable to hospitalization. Adjusting for age, unvaccinated local residents are 30 times more likely to die from COVID than those who have received doses.

The data isn’t convincing everyone. Only about one in three U.S. parents of children ages 5 to 11 planned to get their children inoculated “right away” once a vaccine is authorized, according to polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation published in late September.

Closer to home, about 200 parents and children marched to the SCOE offices Monday to protest Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to mandate coronavirus vaccines in all state schools. That move is expected to come at the start of the 2022-23 academic year.

The holdouts are in the minority, though. The FDA authorized the Pfizer vaccine for kids aged 12-15 in May, and nearly 68% of that age group has now received at least one dose in Sonoma County.

To address parents’ concerns and give them an opportunity to ask questions of local doctors, Sonoma County health and education leaders are planning joint webinars conducted in English and Spanish.

“We know that many parents with children under 12 want to ‘wait and see’ before getting their child vaccinated for COVID-19,” Mase said. “Waiting increases the risks to you and your family. We now have more than 10 months of data on vaccinations in our general population.”

Before the decision on Pfizer lands with the CDC, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel will meet Oct. 26 to review the drug company’s data. Federal regulators have delayed authorizing the Moderna coronavirus vaccine for children following cases of heart inflammation.

Meanwhile, Mase said the county’s virus transmission rates have “leveled off” significantly since the peak of the summer surge two months ago, which saw nearly 70 new cases a day per 100,000 residents. Officials said Tuesday that rate is now 8 new cases a day per 100,000 people.

The overall test positivity, the share of COVID-19 tests that turn up positive, is now just 2%. Mase said COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to decrease as well. “There are currently 19 people in Sonoma County hospitals with COVID, compared with 84 just two months ago,” she said. “This is a sign that our vaccination campaign is working to prevent the worst outcomes of the virus.”

Staff reporter Martin Espinoza contributed to this story. You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.