This county has one of California’s worst COVID vaccination rates. Will it hurt herd immunity?
Health officials in California are hopeful that steady supplies of the vaccine and prompt administration of doses will topple the coronavirus pandemic, bringing herd immunity against COVID-19 in the months to come as appointments can now be made by anyone 16 or older.
But while over 40% of Californians and more than half the state’s adults have now been at least partially vaccinated in the past four months, some pockets of the state continue to trail the rest by wide margins.
One such area is Yuba County, about 40 miles north of the capital in the Sacramento Valley. The disparity may reflect both a lack of locations and vaccine hesitancy in the county.
Among Yuba’s roughly 80,000 residents — including the communities of Marysville, Linda, Olivehurst, Plumas Lake and Wheatland — only 24% had received at least one dose and 16% were fully vaccinated through Tuesday, California Department of Public Health data show, far below the statewide rates of 43% with at least one dose and 26% fully vaccinated.
Yuba vaccination rates below state per-capita average
Residents in the county have only received 56% as many shots as the per-capita average for the state: Just 37 per 100 residents have gotten a jab compared to 66 per 100 across California, according to CDPH.
That ranked Yuba fourth-worst among California’s 58 counties, ahead of only Kings, Tehama and Lassen counties.
Sutter, sister county to Yuba with the two sharing a public health office and one hospital, had a rate of about 51 doses per 100, also below California’s overall rate, but not nearly by the same margin.
Bi-county health officer Dr. Phuong Luu in an emailed response Wednesday told The Sacramento Bee there are a few more vaccination sites in Sutter than in Yuba, an inequity that the county health office is currently working to address.
“The difference in vaccine uptake between Sutter County residents and Yuba County residents is likely due to a greater number of health care facilities (both clinics and local pharmacies) that are vaccination sites on the Sutter County side compared to Yuba County,” Luu wrote. “For example, Sutter County has four local pharmacies and four chain pharmacies offering COVID-19 vaccine whereas Yuba County has zero local pharmacies and three chain pharmacies offering the vaccine.”
“To address the above, we have shifted this week from hosting mass vaccination county-sponsored clinics at one fixed site to pivot to targeted/mobile clinics in neighborhoods where we know there is still low vaccine uptake,” Luu continued.
Paused J&J doses were utilized by a larger percentage
Early last week, California heeded federal agencies’ recommendation to pause use of the single-dose vaccine from Johnson & Johnson while officials investigate six reported cases of rare, severe blood clots in recipients.
Prior to the pause, other valley counties including Sacramento and Yolo had been using the J&J vaccine for most mobile clinics because its single-dose nature negates the need to hit the same neighborhood twice.
“That is the plan” for Yuba-Sutter in future weeks, Luu wrote, “but it is predicated on when the J&J vaccine pause will be lifted by CDC and FDA, and also whether the state would allocate sufficient J&J vaccine supply for us to provide for the mobile clinics.”
Making matters worse — in at least the short term — J&J made up a bigger portion of vaccine doses for Yuba County than for almost any other California county, representing 8% of all Yuba doses through April 12, the last day before the pause.
That’s second only to Imperial County at the state’s southern border and is close to double the 4.4% that J&J had represented of all doses administered statewide up to that point, figures from California’s Open Data Portal show. Sutter County had also used J&J at a relatively high clip, making up 5.9% of its jabs.
Luu told The Bee during an early March interview that she believed some of the discrepancy between the two counties’ vaccination rates to that point could be explained by Sutter outnumbering Yuba in congregate care homes and having more medical workers, both classes that were in tier “1A” of California’s vaccine rollout plan and therefore first in line.
The discrepancy has lingered.
Among residents 65 and older, made eligible in California about three months before the general adult population, only 54% in Yuba County were fully vaccinated as of this week, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared to a statewide rate of 64%. Neighboring Sutter County’s rate was 62% among 65-and-older.
Yuba’s vaccination rate in seniors is far from the worst in the state, though, according to the federal data. Only a reported 50% of 65-plus residents were reportedly fully vaccinated in San Diego County, 45% in Shasta County and 41% in Tehama County. The CDC county-level data does not include numbers on partial vaccinations.
Lower vaccine demand tied to political persuasion?
Another factor in low vaccine rates for the Yuba-Sutter region could be political sentiment. In a survey published in March by the Public Policy Institute of California, 39% of Republicans responded that they would either definitely or probably not get the vaccine, compared to 10% of Democrats. Republican voters outnumber Democrat voters in each county.
A Bee data analysis from earlier this month found another political correlation: Counties that voted more heavily for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election tended to have lower vaccination rates among those 65 and older.
Except for San Diego, Trump won all of the above-mentioned counties by wide margins, taking 59% of the vote in Yuba County, 57% in Sutter and 67% in Tehama. Trump took only 34% of the vote statewide.
Also pointing to wider hesitancy are signals some vaccine appointments in the area appear to be going unfilled.
Harmony Health in Marysville, for example, which runs drive-thru clinics twice a week, had exactly half of its 100 appointment slots still open as of 4 p.m. Thursday, less than 18 hours before its next Friday clinic, according to its appointment booking website.
As for chain pharmacies, Rite Aid and Walgreens on their COVID-19 vaccine webpages each showed no appointments currently available at Yuba or Sutter locations, but CVS listed appointments as being “available” in both Yuba City and Marysville, while many other stores all throughout California were listed as “fully booked.”
Just a week in, it remains too early within California’s 16-and-older eligibility period to have significant real-world data reflecting potential vaccine hesitancy in communities, since uptake rates among those 65 and up are not necessarily indicative of counties’ overall uptake rates.
One factor to look for in the weeks to come, officials say, will be demand. Health experts have estimated it may take a vaccination rate of anywhere from 70% to 85% or more to achieve herd immunity status. If appointment slots are going widely unfilled in communities with vaccination rates well below that range, it could be indicative of a hesitancy problem.
Speaking to The Bee in March, Luu predicted: “We are afraid that the pendulum will swing to the point where in, say, May ... we will actually have to chase around asking people, ‘Please get the vaccine.’”
