Who’s getting coronavirus vaccine shots? Blacks, Hispanics lag others in Fresno County
Blacks represent about 6% of the roughly 1 million residents of Fresno County. But they are being left behind in the efforts to vaccinate up to 750,000 residents against the novel coronavirus.
To date, about 135,000 COVID-19 shots have been administered in Fresno County, according to the state Department of Public Health. Fewer than 2% of those have been given to Blacks in the county, the state reported Wednesday.
The Fresno County Department of Public Health hopes that a new vaccination clinic expected to begin offering shots this week to senior citizens in southwest Fresno will improve that percentage and reduce the racial disparity in the distribution of the vaccine to residents.
The new site at Rutherford B. Gaston Middle School at Church Avenue and Martin Luther King Boulevard is expected to have a “soft launch” on Thursday and Friday. After that, the county health department will evaluate how many doses will be allocated there as it juggles distributing vaccines to other clinics and sites across the county.
As the county rolls out new vaccination sites, a priority is to assure equitable access to the shots, said Joe Prado, community health division manager for the Fresno County Department of Public Health.
“When COVID hit, there really weren’t any surprises,” Prado said recently. “We knew where the health inequities are in our communities. That’s why the Gaston Middle School site was chosen.”
“We know within our African American population there is some mistrust in some of the medical (programs) and some of the vaccine programs,” Prado added. “We’re joining with our African American Coalition, part of our COVID Equity Project, and they’re doing a health education outreach in our areas, and helping run the clinic, as well.”
Recent increases in vaccine allocations from the state to Fresno County – more than double what had been coming each week – are a key to enabling a greater emphasis on the Black community and other underserved populations, including outlying rural communities.
“When we saw that increased allocation, we saw that as a great opportunity to bolster the doses given to Gaston Middle School and really work within those ZIP codes in that community,” Prado said.
Statewide, less than 3% of vaccine doses have gone to Black residents.
Serving Hispanic/Latino communities
The county also has ramped up mobile clinics to serve smaller rural towns that are largely Hispanic/Latino, where challenges include:
▪ more limited access to high-speed internet capability – a handicap when many of the vaccine efforts ask people to sign up online to make appointments;
▪ fewer transportation options to get to appointments for shots in Fresno or other cities where large vaccination clinics are being offered.
Like Black residents, Hispanic or Latino vaccine recipients so far lag behind their proportional share of the county’s population. Hispanic/Latino residents represent almost 58% of the population in Fresno County, but have received less than 25% of the doses given to date.
“The way I see (equity) is what we’re doing now, setting up sites in those rural areas,” Prado said. “Access is going to be a key issue. Transportation is going to be a key issue. Language is going to be a key issue.”
“I think the most efficient way to get doses to our rural residents is really to be in their backyard,” he added.
Non-Hispanic whites are receiving vaccines at a rate that’s a few points higher than the population proportion – about 31.5% of the vaccine doses, compared to 28.6% of the population.
Coronavirus case update
More than 550 new cases of coronavirus were reported Wednesday by counties across the central San Joaquin Valley, led by almost 290 new infections confirmed by testing in Tulare County. Thirteen additional deaths attributed by health officials to COVID-19 were acknowledged across the region Wednesday.
Fresno County: 132 new cases, 93,363 to date since the first local coronavirus infection was confirmed in early March 2020; eight new deaths, 1,349 to date.
Kings County: 38 new cases, 21,696 to date; four additional deaths, 213 to date.
Madera County: Nine new cases, 15,073 to date; no additional deaths, 201 to date.
Mariposa County: No new cases, 388 to date; no additional deaths, seven to date.
Merced County: 105 new cases, 28,306 to date; no additional deaths, 382 to date.
Tulare County: 286 new cases, 47,220 to date; nine additional deaths, 706 to date.
Across the six-county region, more than 206,000 people have tested positive for the virus over the past 11 1/2 months; of those, 2,858 have died of complications from COVID-19.
Statewide, about 3.4 million cases have been reported through Tuesday, and California’s death toll reached 47,507.
This story was originally published February 17, 2021 at 5:11 PM.
