This holiday gift idea is free, widely available and saves lives. What’s not to like?

Here is a holiday gift idea that is easy to get and, better yet, is free: the COVID-19 vaccine.

If you are unvaccinated, get the shot. Or if a loved one or friend has not been vaccinated, encourage that person to become so.

By getting vaccinated, one significantly lowers the likelihood of becoming infected with the coronavirus. That, in turn, drops the possibility of infecting others. What a nice gift! That means spending time with elderly grandparents at Christmas, for example, gets a whole lot more realistic.

At this juncture 10 months after the shots became available, only 50.2% of Fresno County residents are fully vaccinated, according to Bee data journalist Tim Sheehan.

That may seem like a good percentage, but it isn’t. Sheehan found that almost 61% of Californians are fully vaccinated, and another 6.2% are partially vaccinated.

Fewer than one-third of the state’s residents are unvaccinated. In Fresno County, 43.5% of residents have yet to get a shot. Contrast that with six counties in the Bay Area, where more than 70% of people are vaccinated.

Fresno County leads dubious list

Fresno County is not alone in having a low vaccination rate. The central San Joaquin Valley is a poor performer for getting shots. Here is the rundown:

▪ 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.

Putting those rates in more context, the upcoming months are when COVID transmissions have greater odds of increasing.

“With the holidays coming up, there’s going to be a lot of indoor gatherings going on,” said Joe Prado, interim assistant director of Fresno County public health. “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.”

Sheehan noted that since the first local infections were confirmed in March 2020, more than 136,000 cases have been identified in Fresno County, including 2,128 deaths blamed on the virus. The six-county Valley region recently crossed the 300,000-case threshold, with the total at more than 301,000 as of last week. That included 4,345 lives lost.

Unvaccinated surge

A surge of infections over the summer occurred in Southern states where the vaccination rate was low. And the people who got COVID’s delta variant were almost universally those who had not yet been vaccinated.

With the cooler fall and winter months ahead, people will spend more times indoors, which hastens virus transmission. For that reason especially, now is also the time for vaccinated people 65 and older to get their COVID booster shots. People with health complications can also receive boosters.

The COVID vaccine is free. For most people, there are few if any bad side effects. The protection from the respiratory affliction caused by COVID is well worth it.

COVID does not respect genders, races, ethnicities or politics. Get the shot.