Health director for rural region pushes back on vaccination rates

Official says numbers from state fail to take several factors into account

Rural Lassen County — home to roughly 30,000 Californians — sprawls east of Redding and north of the Plumas National Forest against the Nevada state line. So the county’s director of health and social services was more than a little surprised when state officials sent an email asking for her COVID-19 plans to vaccinate the people of Tivoli, Italy.

“How can they get things so wrong?” asked Barbara Longo, the pandemic-weary and frustrated health director.

According to Longo, the state ran a so-called “gap analysis” to identify areas of concern where vaccination rates were low in Lassen County. Somehow, the county’s report included populations from other areas, including North Hollywood and the Italian town of Tivoli, about 20 miles east of Rome.

In an email Monday, the California Department of Public Health acknowledged the mixup as a “nonconsequential typo in a spreadsheet. … Clarification was provided to Lassen County and we are confident this had no material effect on either the state or the county’s vaccination progress.”

The geography glitch is just one part of Lassen County’s broader frustration with the state’s vaccination data. A recent analysis of state data by this news organization found that only about a quarter of the eligible population in Lassen County had received at least one shot — fewer than almost anywhere else in the state.

But Longo thinks the actual vaccination rate is much higher. By her estimates, about 56% of the population is fully vaccinated. Why the huge gulf between the state’s figure and Longo’s? She has a few ideas.

The county is home to two state correctional facilities and one federal correctional facility. Longo doesn’t include inmates in her population estimates because they don’t intermingle with the general population and she doesn’t have access to inmates to vaccinate them. That’s handled by California Correctional Health Care Services and the California Department of Corrections. Lassen County is also home to a military base where a military medical team has

administered vaccines and the Susanville Indian Rancheria, which received its own supply of vaccine from Indian Health Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Longo thinks the state might be including the people with access to these vaccines in the rural county’s overall population count but isn’t sure it’s picking up the full scope of vaccination data.

“Those are numbers that could contribute to the discrepancy,” she said.

CDPH did not directly respond to a question about how it calculates a county’s population, but said in an email, “In many cases, members of the military and our tribal communities are vaccinated by health care providers outside of the Department of Defense or Indian Health Services, and many counties have allocated part of their vaccines to their local Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation institutions to improve their vaccination rates.”

Longo isn’t blaming any one in particular for what she considers a faulty vaccination rate and she has largely resisted publicly criticizing the state, but she’s frustrated by the implication that her county’s vaccine rollout has been lackluster.

“We’ve done incredible outreach in our community,” Longo said. “We’re just doing the best we can.”