SOME S.D. COUNTY AREAS TO GET EXTRA VACCINES
State equity plan aims to send doses to poorest communities
Those living in areas deemed to have some of the poorest access to healthy living conditions in the state, including hundreds of thousands in San Diego County, will have greater access to new doses of coronavirus vaccine due to a new allocation approach formally announced by the state Thursday.
In addition to percentages already set aside for teachers, law enforcement and childcare workers, the state will reserve 40 percent of its incoming vaccine supply for places listed in the bottom 25 percent of California’s Healthy Places Index.
The set of statewide statistics attempts to identify, by ZIP code, which places are most and least conducive to good health and well-being, taking into account two dozen factors including educational attainment, employment, home ownership, household overcrowding, air quality and even the number of nearby supermarkets.
Those in the bottom quarter, said Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s secretary of health and human services, have suffered 40 percent of cases and deaths during the
pandemic but have thus far received only about 16 percent of doses allocated so far.
Only one dozen of San Diego County’s 107 ZIP codes — with a combined population of about 277,000, according to estimates from the San Diego Association of Governments — had equity scores low enough to be deemed in the bottom quartile statewide. Targeted areas included ZIP codes in San Diego, Oceanside, and National City and in smaller towns including Boulevard, Campo, Dulzura and Jacumba.
However, the 91910 and 91911 ZIP codes in Chula Vista, which have the largest case totals in the county, were not listed in the bottom quartile statewide, according to a breakdown provided by the California Department of Public Health Thursday. County records show that those two ZIP codes alone have recorded more than 19,000 total cases through the pandemic to date.
San Ysidro’s 92173 is listed in the bottom quartile, meaning health care and other organizations serving the estimated 27,261 people who live there will soon have access to greater numbers of vaccine doses than they’ve had previously. State officials clarified Thursday that those who receive extra doses must still follow the region’s vaccination priority list which, so far, has approved inoculation for health care, law enforcement and food and agriculture workers, nursing home residents and staff and those age 65 and older.
That sounded quite excellent to Dr. Maria Carriedo-Ceniceros, chief medical officer of San Ysidro Health, the federally qualified health center serving a wide swath of San Diego County’s border region.
Though the organization’s vaccination efforts had put more than 13,000 doses in arms as of Thursday afternoon, its officials reported that it has recently been necessary to reschedule many second doses due to a lack of supply.
Carriedo said that the clinic has managed to persuade many who were initially reluctant to get vaccinated by having their doctors, medical professionals they trusted before the pandemic began, to carry the message.
“If we can get these people vaccinated quicker, then we will definitely have an impact on the overall COVID cases in the county,” Carriedo said.
Nancy Maldonado, chief executive officer of The Chicano
Federation of San Diego, agreed. Focusing vaccination on the places that have been the most severely impacted, she said, should help bring overall new case totals down and push the region closer to the red tier, which will allow greater levels of activity for local businesses.
“This is what we’ve been asking for for a long time, to focus on the most-impacted communities,” Maldonado said.
Making the red tier more attainable is quite literally part of the state’s plan. Once 2 million people in the lowest quartile of health equity ZIP codes have been vaccinated, the state plans to reduce the threshold for the red tier slightly, moving it from 7 cases per 100,000 residents to 10 cases per 100,000. San Diego is currently on the very edge of that breakpoint with a score of 10.8 in the state’s most recent ranking released Tuesday.
Increasing vaccine supply to certain ZIP codes will necessarily mean that others get less, especially since San Diego County is also holding back doses right off the top of any allocations it receives for law enforcement officers and teachers.
Some have been frustrated by the ever-changing nature of the state’s reopening system, and the latest tweaks got immediate blowback on social media from critics who said there was too much focus on Latino communities across the state. Others, though, noted that the health equity metrics are socioeconomic in nature. Race is not a sole determinant.
Ginny Merrifield, executive director of the Parent Association, a nonprofit advocacy group that started in North County and has called for reopening schools more quickly than has been allowed by state mandates, said Thursday that the idea of targeting doses to equity areas did not seem particularly well thought out.
Such a plan, she said, should have had more input from state leaders outside the Governor’s Office.
“I’m all for equity; they need the vaccine, and they need it now,” Merrifield said. “But the way they’re going about it is arbitrary and doesn’t seem very democratic.”
Opinions about how quickly to reopen, and whom to vaccinate first, are not likely to go away anytime soon and will likely be heavily influenced by the number of cases produced daily by a pandemic that, while much less fierce than it was just a few months ago, has stubbornly refused to go away. San Diego’s new case total ticked up by 508 Thursday, the highest the daily number has been in nearly one week. The impact on local hospitals has continued to wane with 144 of those in ICU beds testing positive for the virus.