Officials seeking to close vaccination gap for Hispanics
With Shelby County now making the vaccine available to all people 16 and up, city officials are preparing to boost efforts to improve vaccinations among Hispanics.
Thursday, after The Commercial Appeal published an online article about lagging vaccinations among Hispanics, City of Memphis Chief Operating Officer Doug Mcgowen said the city will work to secure more multilingual operators for the county’s vaccine hotline, 222SHOT.
According to city records, Xtend Healthcare was paid $1.9 million to man the phones for the vaccine hotline.
Calls to 222-SHOT are now forwarded to the company, which also acts the call center for the state’s vaccination system, called VRAS, with more than 700 agents, city spokeswoman Arlenia Cole wrote in an email.
“Because we chose not to use VRAS, they have a subset of call takers for Shelby County (25 agents by contract),” she wrote. “The date that Xtend started taking calls specifically for Shelby County was March 12th.”
Hispanics make up 6.6% of people in Shelby County, according to Census estimates — nearly 62,000 people. As of March 20, only 2.5% of residents that have received a vaccine are Hispanic.
Among the problems are vaccine misinformation and language barriers in making appointments.
An issue with the hotline, Mcgowen said, is excessive wait times for individuals who need a Spanish-speaking operator.
“We know that there has been a lack of sufficient capacity on our 222-SHOT for multilingual personnel to answer calls,” Mcgowen said. “That’s something we are working on, and we believe there will be improvements over the next few days.”
The city will also add a Spanish language translation to the vaccination website, specifically on the page where appointments are scheduled. The website already has Spanish-language resources on the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.
Other steps the city is taking to increase vaccination rates among the Hispanic population include targeted information campaigns that will begin in the near future and partnerships with churches that have predominately Spanish-speaking congregations.
In his remarks Thursday, Mcgowen reiterated a point health officials in Shelby County have made repeatedly: immigration status is a non-issue for those seeking a COVID-19 vaccination.
“We’re not interested in anyone’s status, we’re only interested in getting people vaccination,” Mcgowen said.
Transmission rate begins to creep upwards
For weeks, the transmission rate (often referred to as the R naught) in Shelby County has stayed several tenths of a point below one. This means that for every one person infected in Shelby County, less than one additional case is caused by the infected person.
During surges of COVID-19 cases, the transmission rate in Shelby County climbed as high as 1.22, meaning every person infected with COVID-19 was spreading the disease to more than one person. The number has started to trend upwards again in Shelby County, in part because of the introduction of more contagious strains, or variants, within communities.
David Sweat, deputy director of the Shelby County Health Department, confirmed Thursday the transmission rate has once again surpassed 1.0, specifically 1.04 as of last check, Sweat said.
“Now, each new case is creating another new case,” Sweat said. The good news, according to Sweat, is the test positivity rate remains low, around 3.7% of all tests are coming back positive for COVID-19.
Sweat said officials would continue to watch all metrics that indicate how well the community is faring one year into the pandemic and a few months into the vaccination campaign.
Sweat did not say whether an increase in these metrics would trigger another health directive with business and gathering restrictions, but said the task force evaluate these metrics before the next directive.
“That’s one reason why we write the health directives monthly,” Sweat said, “(It’s) to give ourselves flexibility, to adjust to what the data suggests we should do. If there is any evidence that the directive needs to be tightened back up, we will do that.”
Sweat said that, at present, none of the data reviewed by task force members suggested any reason for alarm.
Reporters Daniel Connolly and Samuel Hardiman contributed to this report.