See Fresno County vaccination rates by ZIP code. How does your neighborhood compare?
In four months since the first COVID-19 vaccines began arriving in California and Fresno County, more than half a million doses have been shot into the arms of residents living in the sprawling county.
To date, more than one out of five people in Fresno County are now considered “fully vaccinated,” meaning they’ve completed both doses of either the two-dose vaccines produced by Pfizer or Moderna, or one shot of the single-dose vaccine from Janssen/Johnson & Johnson.
Officials at the Fresno County Department of Public Health have worked to assure that all residents have equitable access to coronavirus vaccines, no matter whether they live in far-flung rural farming hamlets or urban pockets of the Fresno-Clovis metro area.
But in some parts of the county, the percentage of people getting their shots lags far behind other places, with fewer than 30% of residents getting even one shot for protection against the virus.
The early vaccination efforts included mass vaccination sites giving hundreds of shots a day at the Fresno Fairgrounds in southeast Fresno, Sierra Pacific Orthopedic Center in northeast Fresno, and at the Central High School East Campus in northwest Fresno. As eligibility was expanded to include senior citizens, educators, food and agriculture workers and other occupations, the rollout was at times stymied by a shortage of vaccines being allocated to Fresno County by state health officials.
Gradually, as the supply concerns have eased, the county has increased opportunities and places where a growing number of eligible people could get vaccinated, including clinics in communities outside the Fresno-Clovis urban area.
The equity efforts have also included establishing temporary, pop-up or mobile vaccination clinics in neighborhoods where residents’ access to medical care has historically been lacking. There also has been special outreach to immigrant neighborhoods, agricultural employers and tiny rural towns in western Fresno County.
At the same time, more retail pharmacies, private medical practices and community health clinics, hospitals and other places are also giving shots.
Slower on the uptake
Now that California and its counties have opened vaccine eligibility to anyone over the age of 16 who wants a shot, however, there’s a problem: the initial surge of demand for the vaccine has slumped dramatically, leaving thousands of appointment slots for shots unfilled across Fresno County.
That’s a concern for county health leaders who want to see at least 60% of residents – and ideally up to 75% or more – get vaccinated by the end of this summer to provide a robust degree of “herd immunity” in which there are fewer people who are able to catch the virus and then spread it to others. That’s going to take about 1.2 million doses, based on the two-shot regimen of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines that are now being given.
There’s certainly a degree of vaccine hesitancy in the community, said Dr. Rais Vohra, interim health officer for the Fresno County Department of Public Health. For some, there are worries about the safety of the vaccine since it was developed over a period of months, rather than years of clinical trials like most drugs.
There’s a segment of the population who have a general distrust of vaccines. And there are others who remain unconvinced about the severity of the pandemic that in Fresno County has infected more than 100,000 people and claimed more than 1,600 lives over the past 13 months.
“We know vaccine hesitancy is out there,” Vohra said. “I wish we had better answers for those who are still skeptical.”
But for many more, there are cultural, social and economic obstacles that make getting a vaccine more of an ordeal.
“We know there’s a number of structural challenges in our community,” said Sandra Celedon, one of the leaders of the Immigrant Refugee Coalition, a group of community organizations working with Fresno County to ensure that traditionally underserved communities have access to the vaccines.
“We have pharmacy deserts or other community infrastructure deserts like the lack of community spaces where we can host big vaccine events,” Celedon said earlier this month. “Transportation is another big barrier, so we have to be proactive and strategic about how do we take vaccines into neighborhoods.”
“It’s really about making sure we have multiple avenues and multiple doors for folks to have access to those vaccines.”
The Immigrant Refugee Coalition, part of UCSF Fresno’s COVID Equity Project, has helped build a network of people across the county – trained community health workers, program managers, coordinators and others – encompassing 14 different races or ethnicities and 16 different languages as part of the effort to overcome cultural and language barriers for residents to learn about vaccines.
“This is about providing information and resources to folks in the language they’re most comfortable with,” Celedon said.
Disparities in vaccine penetration
Despite the efforts of the county, its community partners and medical providers, the percentage of residents who have gotten shots varies widely in different areas, based on an analysis of vaccines delivered by ZIP code data in Fresno County.
About 70% of Fresno County’s residents live in ZIP codes that are among the most economically and socially disadvantaged neighborhoods in the state, fall within the bottom 25% of California’s Healthy Places Index. And across those ZIP codes countywide, vaccination data shows that just over 28% of residents have received even one shot of vaccine.
That’s compared to almost 43% of residents vaccinated in areas that fall in the top half of the Healthy Places Index.
In Fresno, the smallest percentage of vaccine distribution is in the 93701 ZIP code, an area north of downtown Fresno and bounded by Highway 41 to the east and Highway 99 to the west. Of about 12,000 residents in the area, only 2,224 had been vaccinated by mid-April – about 18.4%. It’s also one of many ZIP codes in the bottom 25% of the Healthy Places index.
Across town, in northeast Fresno and Clovis, vaccine uptake in the 93730 and 93619 ZIP codes is among some of the highest in the county, both above 45% of residents receiving at least one shot. Both are also ZIP codes that are in the highest 25% of areas on the Healthy Places Index.
Joe Prado, community health division manager for Fresno County who is overseeing vaccine efforts, said this week that it’s going to be more challenging to continue making progress toward a rate of 60% of full immunization before the end of the summer. It’s going to force the county, and its community partners, to get more creative in outreach and delivery of shots.
That’s going to take more mobile and pop-up clinics in areas where officials see less demand, and possibly developing some type of incentives to reward people for getting their shots.
“We are going to have to increase the amount of education outreach to really address vaccine hesitancy,” Prado said. “We’re just going to have to make adjustments … and seeing what it’s going to take to get a neighborhood and take the vaccine literally street by street and block by block.”
This story was originally published April 18, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
