California’s coast embraces COVID-19 shots for children, while demand lags inland
LOS ANGELES — Early demand for the COVID-19 vaccine for young children has been startlingly uneven in California, with some areas embracing the shots and others much slower to accept them, a Times data analysis has found.
It’s a pattern that has experts concerned and could have serious implications for how a coronavirus winter surge could spread through various regions of the state.
In San Francisco, 30% of 5- to 11-year-olds have received one shot since the vaccination was authorized for the age group three weeks ago. In Santa Clara County, home to Silicon Valley, the figure is 28%, and in Marin County, once a hotbed of antivaccination sentiment, it’s an astonishing 46%, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of state data.
Those rates are well above the national rate of 12% and the statewide rate of 13%. Los Angeles and Orange counties are reporting that 12% of kids in the age group are partially vaccinated; San Diego County reports 13%, and Ventura County, 10%.
Yet uptake of vaccines for kids is lagging across inland California, with rates of 5% in San Bernardino and Kern counties, 6% in Riverside County and 7% in Fresno County.
“In one sense, the higher levels of 5- to 11-year-old vaccination rates is somewhat a surrogate measure for vaccine acceptance at all ages,” said UCLA epidemiologist Dr. Robert KimFarley.
Generally, the areas of California with the slowest rate of administering vaccines — rural Northern California and the Central
Valley — are where COVID-19 hospitalization rates are the highest.
“There will be a winter surge,” said UC San Francisco epidemiologist Dr. George Rutherford. “What I worry about most is the Central Valley, in more rural California, where vaccination rates are lower than they are in other parts of the state and are currently having high levels of transmission.”
The outlook is most optimistic for the San Francisco Bay Area, which has the state’s highest vaccination rate and lowest COVID-19 hospitalization rate.
“In parts of California with higher vaccination rates, I think we can fully expect the winter surge to be more blunted. We may avoid it; we may not. I suspect it will just be at a lower level,” Rutherford said.
The future for the coastal Southern California counties is less clear. It’s possible that the level of vaccination, plus naturally acquired immunity from last winter’s surge, will leave Southern California’s biggest metro areas “reasonably protected,” Rutherford said.
In a diverse area like L.A. County, there will likely be areas with varying rates of COVID-19 vaccinations, said Dr. Kirsten BibbinsDomingo, chair of UC San Francisco’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.
“Ultimately, the experience of vaccination rates is very local. And so how it will play out — it might be some average of the two extremes in the Bay Area and the San Joaquin Valley, but probably more [likely], it will be that some communities will really be much more protected, and some will have the potential to have strikingly higher rates of transmission, especially as we get to the holidays,” Bibbins-domingo said.