Elk Grove holding off on employee vaccine mandate. Many in the city have gotten the shot
Elk Grove is not requiring city employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 for now largely because many staffers have already gotten the shots, city officials said this week.
“Our organization is not considering requiring vaccinations for employees at this time,” Elk Grove spokeswoman Kristyn Laurence said Thursday, citing the high numbers of vaccinated workers in the city’s ranks and high vaccination rates more broadly among residents in the city of nearly 180,000 people.
Urgency has grown across the state as the highly contagious Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus has sent case rates soaring, with cities, counties and corporate California requiring their employees to get vaccinated. Those include the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego County, all now requiring their workers to get vaccinated or show proof of vaccination.
Closer to home, at least 39 people in Sacramento County died from COVID-19 in July, more than in May or June, The Sacramento Bee reported Thursday, but health officials have been encouraged that far more residents are seeking out the vaccine.
On Thursday afternoon, the state’s public health officer said all health care workers must be fully vaccinated by Sept. 30, making California the first state in the nation to impose the requirement. That shelves a weekly testing option Gov. Gavin Newsom had instituted in an earlier order.
In Elk Grove, roughly 80% of city employees have been fully vaccinated, Laurence said, numbers that roughly mirror that of Elk Grove’s neighborhoods, the data shows.
Vaccination numbers are robust across Elk Grove, according to California Department of Technology data. In east Elk Grove’s 95624 ZIP code and in the western 95758 area, two of the city’s most populated areas with more than 111,000 residents combined, the vaccination rate for those 12 years and older is 72.6%.
The percentage of vaccinated residents 12 and over in the central 95757 neighborhoods outpaces those numbers. There, more than eight in 10 — 83.2% — of residents received their vaccine shots, the state data showed.
More than 21 million people in California are fully vaccinated — 53% of the population — according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Meantime, businesses from Google to Facebook have instituted their own mandates. Sacramento’s Sutter Health this week mandated COVID-19 vaccinations for its employees. Earlier in the week, Oakland-based health network Kaiser Permanente announced that it was requiring its employees be vaccinated.
The city of Sacramento is considering vaccine requirements for its employees; and on Thursday, the Sacramento Kings issued a statement saying all full-time and part-time Kings employees will be required to be vaccinated by Nov. 1, or be dismissed.
“Tragically, this pandemic is not over and with the rising number of cases, we have made the decision to require all Sacramento Kings team members to be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of employment,” Kings owner Vivek Ranadive said in the statement, adding that “vaccines are the best tool available to protect one another and eradicate this virus.”
This story was originally published August 6, 2021 at 12:45 PM.
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