Mayor links vaccine efforts to lost focus
WATSONVILLE » Though Santa Cruz’s south county population took the brunt of the COVID-19 cases and deaths during the pandemic, it didn’t qualify under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Healthy Places Index (HPI) measured priority initiative announced last week.
The HPI considers factors that relate to life expectancy and community conditions, such as education and transportation. The tool has been utilized by the County of Santa Cruz Health Services Agency in determining vaccine priority, as the HPI highlights equity issues certain communities are facing.
Some were surprised, but Watsonville Mayor Jimmy Dutra was not. Despite parts of the city rating in the lowest possible percentile, work has been done to try to mitigate the negative effects the crisis continues to have on the community.
“I think we just don’t qualify because of the amount of people we’ve already vaccinated,” he said. “We are still reeling from the effects the pandemic has left on us. Trying to get as many people vaccinated as possible is really important.”
Dutra knows his stats as reflected on the county’s coronavirus data dashboard. Of all Santa Cruz County COVID-19 deaths younger than the age of 65, 100% happened in Watsonville. Every single one of the deceased was Latino.
“People here live in generational housing, multiple generations of people are living in one house.
We are essential workers. I think that was just a perfect storm for this disease,” Dutra said. “Once it hit a household, it would just spread.”
The mayor and his colleagues have been fighting and advocating to get vaccines to South County, partnering with the county’s Public Health Division and partners such as Salud Para La Gente and Watsonville Health Center to prioritize those in the age groups and occupations most at risk to contract the virus.
There was fear, due to lack of opportunities around health care access and education discussed by heads of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that the Latino population would not take advantage of getting vaccinated. But when the supply at Salud Para La Gente, the county fairgrounds in Watsonville, the OptumServe site or the clinic at the downtown Old City Hall is there, Latino people are coming, Dutra said.
“We’ve been starting to get a decent amount of
vaccines, but we also have to give kudos to the Santa Cruz County Farm Bureau,” Dutra said, crediting the organization for the vaccination of thousands of local farmworkers. “That helps tremendously.”
Dutra acknowledged that South County could have been left out of the state initiative due to the fact that the Healthy Places Index measures by census tract and the region has a sizeable population here without permission.
“If they aren’t being counted because of their status, that could be a huge problem,” he said. “That means… a huge population is not being seen.”
The HPI’s COVID-19 map, illustrating the cumulative number of cases, only measures the impact by county. Because the county’s case rate averages are lower than the state’s and because its general vulnerable populations are lesser than counties with more nonwhite seniors, seniors in poverty and disabled for example, it falls into the least impacted group.
Health Officer Dr. Gail
Newel pointed out the generally high HPI quartiles countywide during a weekly health leadership press conference on March 4. This could be another contributing factor to the decision not to include any part of the county in what Newsom calls the vaccine equity metric.
The more vaccine that arrives, the more comforted the people of Watsonville and its leaders are. With the arrival of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, Dutra is hopeful that more residents — especially essential workers such as bus drivers announced to be in the next priority group Thursday — can be inoculated sooner rather than later.
“I had the Moderna two-shot series,” Dutra, a teacher, said. “But the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is one and done. It could be perfect for a lot of younger people. It still has great coverage, but it would fit those out there without a mask, socializing. We need to get them vaccinated as well so that we can stop the spread and the variants (from) coming.”