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San Mateo County is a step closer to reaching the goal of releasing the mask mandate set forth by eight counties and the city of Berkeley on Oct. 7, Chief of Health Louise Rogers said at the Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 19.
The county has a COVID-19 testing positivity rate of 0.9% overall and 1.3% positivity for the lowest quarter of people represented in the state's Healthy Places Index, which measures health factors among the county's most economically disadvantaged.
The lower positivity rate is one of three metrics the county will require under the multicounty criteria prior to relaxing the indoor mask mandate. To lift the mandate, a county would need to meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's criteria for the moderate yellow tier for COVID-19 transmission for three consecutive weeks; 80% of the county's total population has had both doses of the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine or one shot of Janssen/Johnson & Johnson's vaccine, and hospital rates must remain low and stable. Alternatively, the mandate could be lifted if eight weeks have passed since a COVID-19 vaccine has been authorized for emergency use by federal and state authorities for 5- to 11-year-olds.
The county corrected its data and found it has a larger percentage of unvaccinated people who are eligible to receive the vaccine than it previously tallied, at 67,000. Rogers said 72.5% of the total county population is fully vaccinated. The county's vaccination rates far surpass the nation's average, which is 57% for the fully vaccinated eligible population, she noted.
Dr. Anand Chabra, San Mateo County Health's COVID-19 mass vaccination section chief, said that Pfizer-BioNTech is asking the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization for COVID-19 vaccines to be given to children ages 5 to 11 and a hearing is scheduled for Oct. 26. If approved, the vaccines could be available sometime in November, he said.
On Wednesday, Oct. 20, the FDA gave emergency use authorization for Moderna and Johnson & Johnson booster vaccinations to be given as a single dose. The Moderna booster may be administered at least six months after completion of the primary series to individuals ages 65 years of age and older and those ages 18-64 who are at high risk of severe COVID-19 or who have frequent institutional or occupational exposure to COVID-19. The single booster dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine may be administered at least two months after completion of the single-dose primary regimen to people ages 18 and older.
More than 1.1 million total vaccine doses have been administered in San Mateo County with 62 percent being the vaccine developed by Pfizer-BioNTech, according to data from SMC Public Health. Only around 40,000 Johnson & Johnson vaccines have been administered to people in San Mateo County.
The FDA also approved using each of the available vaccines, including the Pfizer vaccine, for "mix and match" booster shots following completion of primary vaccination with a different, available COVID-19 vaccine. The booster dose won't be dependent upon the brand of vaccine that a recipient previously received during their initial inoculations.
The Pfizer vaccine received FDA approval for its booster shot on Sept. 22 for people who are ages 65 and older or are ineligible groups and have medical or work conditions that would make them likely to have severe COVID-19 infections.
Michelle Iracheta contributed to this report.
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