Barely half of Fresno County is vaccinated for COVID. Is a holiday surge on the way?
It took 10 months from the time when the first coronavirus vaccinations became available for Fresno County to get at least half of its residents fully vaccinated.
As of Wednesday, more than 518,000 people were fully vaccinated against COVID-19 out of the county’s overall population of about 1,032,000. Those are people who have received either both shots of the two-dose vaccines from Pfizer BioNTech or Moderna, or a single dose of the one-shot product from Janssen/Johnson & Johnson.
Almost 65,000 more residents are partially vaccinated with one dose of one of the two-shot vaccines.
There remain, however, more than 449,000 people in Fresno County – about 43.5% – who are completely unvaccinated, yet to receive even one shot of one of the medications. And the number of people still unprotected against the virus could spell trouble coming into the winter holiday season of expected family and public gatherings.
Fresno County and the rest of the central San Joaquin Valley lag well behind the statewide rate of vaccination against the coronavirus.
Statewide, almost 61% of California’s population is fully vaccinated, and another 6.2% is partially vaccinated. Fewer than one-third of the state’s residents are unvaccinated. In six of California’s 58 counties, all in the San Francisco Bay Area, more than 70% of the population is vaccinated, and the rate exceeds 60% in 13 other counties.
Fresno County’s vaccination rate ranks 34th among 58 counties – yet it’s at the head of the class among neighboring counties in the central San Joaquin Valley region:
- Madera County: 45.3% fully vaccinated (45th of 58 counties), 49.1% unvaccinated.
- Tulare County: 43.7% fully vaccinated (46th of 59 counties), 50.3% unvaccinated.
- Merced County: 41.4% fully vaccinated (50th of 58 counties), 49.5% unvaccinated.
- Kings County: 36.4% fully vaccinated (55th of 58 counties), 58% unvaccinated.
- Mariposa County: 36.1% fully vaccinated (57th of 58 counties), 49.2% unvaccinated.
The low demand for vaccines in recent months and a stubborn plateau in the number of shots being given on a weekly basis remain a concern for health officials in Fresno County, which in recent weeks has seen a disturbing increase in the volume of deaths blamed on COVID-19 even as the weekly average number of cases has declined.
Earlier this year, county health officials said they had hoped to reach a vaccination rate of 65% to 75% – a level believed to provide a broad “herd immunity” against the spread of the coronavirus within the community – by the end of the summer.
The current fully-vaccinated rate of 50.2% in Fresno County – or about 61% of people ages 12 and older who are eligible to get the shots – leaves the door open for continued spread of the virus, including the highly contagious delta variant as students return to school, the economy continues to reopen and more people resume a pre-pandemic level of activity in public.
Holiday season approaching
The low rate also could mean trouble during the upcoming holiday season, said Joe Prado, interim assistant director of the Fresno County Department of Public Health.
“With the holidays coming up, there’s going to be a lot of indoor gatherings going on,” Prado said last week. “If we look at December and January of (this past) year, that’s when Fresno County peaked with the most amount of cases, and then in January and February after that surge we experienced the most deaths.”
Fresno County has a vaccine-eligible population of just under 842,000 residents. But that could increase substantially next week, as federal health officials are on the verge of granting emergency-use authorization for the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine to be administered in lower doses for children ages 5 to 11.
Once the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control give a green light to the pediatric shots, there will be about 110,000 newly-eligible youngsters in Fresno County, boosting the vaccine-eligible population to about 952,000.
Prado said the county has set an ambitious goal of reaching a 75% vaccination rate of its eligible population before December and the thick of the holiday season.
The most-vaccinated segment of Fresno County’s is senior citizens ages 65 and older, with 72% fully vaccinated and almost 80% with at least one shot.
Prado said that when the one-shot rate reached 75% among the county’s senior citizens, “we saw a reduction in that population presenting in emergency rooms, so we really want to hit that goal” countywide.
Given vaccine uptake over the past few months, however, Prado acknowledged the challenge of getting to 75% of eligible residents – a group that, once the 5- to 11-year-olds are added, would number about 952,000.
Reaching 75% of that expanded population would mean getting more than 714,000 people at least partially vaccinated – an increase of about 130,000 over what the county has achieved to date. “It is statistically significant to reach that within a two-month period,” Prado acknowledged last week.
“Yes, we are setting our goal outside the statistical boundaries, but I think that’s what we need,” he added. “We’re going to need that level of protection going into these holidays with the delta variant in our community. … We don’t want to experience the amount of death that we did this past year.”
Since the first local infections of the global COVID-19 were confirmed in March 2020, more than 136,000 cases have been identified in Fresno County, including 2,128 deaths blamed on the virus.
Valleywide, the six-county region crossed the 300,000-case threshold this week, with the total to date at more than 301,000 as of Thursday. Those include 4,345 lives lost to COVID-19 in the pandemic.
This story was originally published October 28, 2021 at 3:45 PM.
