Food trucks, COVID vaccine clinics pair up in Fresno, Clovis. Here’s where and when
Demand for coronavirus vaccines in Fresno County continues to languish, dropping to an average of about 3,200 shots per day in May – less than half what it was the previous month, after peaking at almost 8,200 per day in March.
That’s forcing health officials to get creative in finding ways to reach out to more than 400,000 ages 12 and older in Fresno County who are eligible to get a COVID-19 shot but have not yet done so.
This week, the Fresno County Department of Public Health is teaming with Fresno Street Eats to offer pop-up vaccination clinics at a series of popular food-truck events that typically attract hundreds – and sometimes thousands – of people looking for tacos, barbecue, sandwiches or other eat-and-run fare.
To sweeten the deal, the county is providing a $10 voucher good for any of the food trucks at that day’s or night’s venue, said Mike Osegueda, organizer of Fresno Street Eats.
The vaccine clinics will join Fresno Street Eats for events Wednesday night through Saturday. The schedule includes:
- Wednesday: 5 to 8 p.m. at Loma Vista Church, Shaw and McCall avenues east of Clovis.
- Thursday: 5 to 8 p.m. at the Granville-Teague Community Center on Polk Avenue, north of Gettysburg Avenue, in northwest Fresno.
- Thursday: 6 to 9 p.m. at the Brewery District ArtHop event at Fulton and Inyo streets in downtown Fresno.
- Friday: 5 to 8 p.m. at People’s Church, Cedar Avenue north of Herndon Avenue in northeast Fresno.
- Friday: 6 to 10 p.m. at Simonian Farms, Jensen and Clovis avenues in southeast Fresno.
- Saturday: 4 to 8 p.m. at the Sierra Vista Mall on Shaw Avenue, east of Clovis Avenue, in Clovis.
“The idea had been brought up to us in a number of conversations before the county came to us directly,” Osegueda told The Bee. “It’s kind of a big undertaking, but we have a lot of locations already, so it seems like a good thing that (the health department) can plug into.”
No appointments or registration will be needed to get a vaccine. In addition, getting a shot also qualifies a person for California’s “Vax for the Win” lottery for cash prizes.
Osegueda said the venue for the first evening of the campaign, Loma Vista Church at Shaw and McCall avenues east of Clovis, is one of the better locations for the participating food trucks frequently drawing as many as 1,000 people on Wednesday nights.
But with daytime high temperatures reaching 100 degrees or higher through most of this week, there is uncertainty about whether the heat may reduce the usual turnout at the events.
Unconventional efforts
The collaboration with Fresno Street Eats is the latest in a string of incentives being tried by the county health department to encourage those for whom protection from coronavirus for themselves or their community is insufficient motivation to be vaccinated. Gift cards for grocery stores or local businesses have become part of the program for clinics in rural communities, as have promotions involving the Fresno Chaffee Zoo and the Fresno Grizzlies minor-league baseball team.
That’s even before California launched its lottery program with $16.5 million in prize drawings to help bring more arms to needles statewide.
More than 102,000 Fresno County residents have been infected by COVID-19 at some point since the first local cases surfaced in March 2020, including more than 1,700 people who died from the respiratory disease or its complications.
Local health officials estimated that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the overall populace needs to be fully vaccinated to provide a comfortable level of “herd immunity” in which there are too few people for the virus to effectively spread from person to person and reproduce.
To date, the county’s vaccination program has achieved getting about one-third of the county’s 1 million-plus residents fully vaccinated – getting both doses of either a Pfizer or Moderna two-shot vaccine or one shot of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine – and 42.2% have gotten at least one shot.
The percentages are slightly better when counting only people ages 12 and older who are eligible to be vaccinated – almost 41% fully vaccinated and just under 52% getting at least one shot.
Still, almost 600,000 county residents haven’t received a shot. That includes more than 406,000 people who are vaccine-eligible, as well as people who can’t get vaccinated yet because they are younger than 12 years old.
A growing and rolling enterprise
Osegueda, a former reporter for The Bee and for Yahoo! Sports, said bringing in pop-up vaccine clinics is a progression of support for the community and small businesses that drove him to launch Fresno Street Eats in 2019.
“I’ve always been interested in supporting small businesses and helping people prosper and get their stories out there,” he said. Organizing food truck events “is a little different approach to it.”
“I think we found that with food trucks in particular, when you add a little organization and marketing and make an effort to get into different areas of the community, there is strength in numbers,” he said.
In 2019 and into the early months of 2020, Fresno Street Eats was coordinating a couple of events each month for food trucks to congregate. And then the coronavirus pandemic hit.
“We started trying to figure out, ‘How do I not let my friends go out of business,’” Osegueda said. A growing schedule of more frequent and weekly events in different parts of the Fresno-Clovis area was the eventual result, and one that made it attractive for the county’s vaccination program.
“Our model is already built on geographic diversity because we didn’t want to have trucks in the same part of town every day,” Osegueda said. “And the county is trying to create a geographic mix” for its clinics.
