Slowdown in interest for thousands of vaccination slots

On Friday, the first day after the statewide expansion, virtually all of the 1,400 appointments were snapped up. But by Tuesday, just two-thirds of available appointments — about 2,300 of 3,400 — were booked, and only after “herculean” efforts to get the word out, a spokesperson said. The schedule for the rest of the week suggests a steep drop-off in interest.

Fewer than 1,500 people had booked appointments for Wednesday, out of nearly 3,700 available slots. For Thursday and Friday, only 82 people and 46 people, respectively, had signed up, although more than 3,200 slots are available each day.

The drop-off is among emerging signs that the Bay Area is fast approaching a juncture when it will have more vaccine than people who want it — a stark contrast to just a few weeks ago when lack of vaccine supply seemed to be the biggest problem slowing down inoculations.

Now that vaccines are more widely available and many motivated people have received at least a first shot, the region could soon reach a saturation point where everyone who wanted vaccination has it already.

In Napa, interest is waning so quickly that the Meritage site, which previously emphasized appointments, is now open to walk-ins every day. Unused doses of the Pfizer vaccine are sitting in deep freezers.

“We definitely have the capacity, the will and the volunteers and the commitment from everyone doing this work in Napa County,” said county spokeswoman Janet Upton. “But now what we’re lacking is, seemingly, public interest.”

Officials elsewhere in the Bay Area are seeing similar slowdowns. In Contra Costa County, many appointments are going unfilled this week for the first time since vaccinations began, a county spokesman said. A one-day vaccine clinic in Brentwood last weekend captured this shift: only 25% of available first-dose slots were filled. And other clinics planned for Thursday and Friday in San Ramon still have many openings.

“Just a couple of weeks ago, we would have filled those clinics in less than 24 hours,” said county spokesperson Will Harper.

Marin County also appears to be nearing a similar stage, with hundreds of appointments going unclaimed amid an influx of vaccine supply.

“We definitely have seen a slowed pace,” said county spokesperson Laine Hendricks. “We may be nearing a saturation point, but we also recognize that supply has increased dramatically in the last week or so … This is one of the most flush weeks we had in the entire vaccination response.”

Not all parts of the region are there yet. Health officials in several other Bay Area counties say demand is still outpacing supply and appointments are booking up fast.

Alameda County has 26,000 people signed up for appointments at county vaccine clinics. San Mateo expects its first-dose clinic at the Event Center mass vaccination site this weekend to be fully booked, since vaccine supply in the county remains “severely constrained,” said county spokesperson Preston Merchant.

In Santa Clara, the mass vaccination clinic at Levi’s Stadium — which administered a record 12,000 shots Friday — is still scheduling 10,000 appointments a day.

Still, the fact that some pockets are starting to plateau raises questions about how to best tackle the next, arguably more complicated phase of vaccinations — reaching the last “holdouts” who are not especially eager to get vaccinated. This gap could hold back the larger community from reaching herd immunity sooner, officials say.

The Bay Area has some of the highest vaccination rates in the state, with eight of the 10 counties with the highest vaccination rates per capita located in the region, according to an analysis of state data on county vaccination rates compiled by Marin County. The analysis includes counties with populations of at least 100,000 residents.

In five Bay Area counties, at least 60% of eligible people are partially vaccinated and at least 40% are fully vaccinated — higher than the statewide rates of 53% partially vaccinated and 33% fully vaccinated, according to county and state figures. Public health experts estimate that to reach herd immunity, the percentage of people vaccinated needs to hit 70% or higher.

“It may take us as long to get through the last 15% as it took to get to the first 85%,” Marin County Public…