Sacramento hasn’t released racial data on COVID vaccinations. Are communities being left out?

Virginia Covarrubias and Francisca Virelas had gotten COVID-19 together in September, and barely managed to survive. And now, the friends of 12 years sat side-by-side awaiting their first round of shots to inoculate them against the devastating disease.

“We couldn’t miss this opportunity to be here,” Covarrubias, 69, said just moments after a WellSpace Health doctor pushed a needle into her arm. “A lot of people were dying, and being that we’re both seniors, the chances were really slim but we pulled through, thank God.”

Early data last spring revealed that communities of color in Sacramento have generally seen disproportionately higher rates of COVID-19, with hot spots raging across some of the county’s most underserved and low-income neighborhoods. Latino households in Sacramento have been hit particularly hard by the virus.

But since the county began its massive vaccine rollout in December, little information about the race and ethnicity of recipients has been released. It’s left community groups and health advocates largely in the dark about whether doses are getting to those who need it most.

“We need data on who’s been vaccinated and where the vaccinations have been available,” said Dr. Flojaune Cofer, senior director of policy at Public Health Advocates. “Is it in communities that are predominately people of color? Can I get a vaccine in my neighborhood if I want one? And if you can’t answer that question, it doesn’t matter what the data looks like, that’s a structural issue.”

Even though it is required by the federal government, a majority of states, including California, have not included race and ethnicity data on their public vaccine dashboards. Among most states that have released that information, white residents are securing the vaccine at a higher rate compared to their population size.

California anticipates releasing statewide preliminary demographics data on who’s receiving the vaccine, Gov. Gavin Newsom said during a press conference Monday.

“I should note, what we will put out likely will not be truly representative of where we’re going because the first cohorts that have gotten these vaccines have been cohorts that are not truly representative of the diversity of the state,” Newsom said.

It’s unclear what the current vaccine distribution picture looks like in Sacramento County. But public health officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye told The Bee that it’s likely people of color trail white residents in receiving the vaccine.

“This is true not just for Sacramento, but you’ll see it across all of California,” Kasirye said. “As we move further, especially 65+ and doing (distribution) by age, we will be able to have more clinics for the general public and have more clinics targeting disadvantaged communities in a way that we’ll be able to reduce the disparity.”

Communities of color face a lack of access

It’s true that vaccine distribution in the county thus far has focused primarily on inoculating healthcare workers, emergency responders and residents at long-term care facilities, which could explain some disparities. Starting next week, the county will begin vaccinating thousands of educators and child care workers.

But many county-sponsored vaccination sites and local hospital systems have in fact been vaccinating residents based on age for weeks, in some cases down to people 65 and older. And Rachel Rios, executive director at La Familia Counseling Center, said that an equitable vaccine distribution that considers race and ethnicity could be achieved now.

For instance, workers in food and agriculture are currently eligible to receive the vaccine per the state’s current guidelines prioritizing certain essential workers, along with teachers and those in emergency services. But Rios said that food and agriculture workers, largely made up of Latino residents, have fallen to the back of the line.

“Latinos are the frontline workers in the service industry (and) we continue to overlook agriculture workers,” Rios said. “We fought over toilet paper, what would happen if we have to fight over food? I don’t think people realize the important of getting this group of workers vaccinated.”

Kasirye told the Bee that the county “did have to make some decisions on which groups we’d start with.” Getting teachers and first responders to appointments at the county’s mass vaccination site at Cal Expo, for example, could be achieved more quickly than opening mobile vaccine clinics at farms and worksites, she said.

Despite the dearth of vaccine data, the spectrum of where doses are currently being distributed has already left some local health advocates worried. More than 4,000 people have already been inoculated at Jesuit High School, located in the mostly white and wealthier neighborhood of Carmichael, in partnership with Urgent Care Now.

In contrast, La Familia — which has operated a testing site for months and hosted flu shot clinics in the past — has only just been approved to run a pop-up drive-thru COVID-19 vaccination site this weekend. Rios said the county initially gave the organization just 75 doses to deliver to select seniors and agriculture workers in the nonprofit’s network of mostly Latino clients.

“We said, ‘Come on,’ and then they doubled that,” Rios said. “You don’t know what we’ve had to go through (to secure doses). There’s a lack of access due to affluence that the rest of us don’t have.”

Advocates urge the release of vaccine data

Early in the pandemic, undertesting in Sacramento’s low income neighborhoods and communities of color led to cases being severely undercounted among nonwhite residents. Cofer said it is critical local and state health leaders avoid a repeat and start tracking where the vaccine is going now.

“What you do is, if you begin to see a challenge, you can pivot quickly, so you don’t wake up a year from now and see all these ZIP codes that have no vaccination coverage, which can sometimes have deadly consequences, especially as we begin to scale up,” Cofer said.

The county has not set a timeline for when it will release ethnicity or age data related to vaccinations. “We are still reviewing data for accuracy,” said county spokeswoman Janna Haynes in an email. “Once we add that data, we’ll make an announcement.”

Several counties in California have already released similar data sets, illustrating stark disparities.

In Orange County, for example, just 11% of doses have been identified as having been given to Hispanic residents, despite making up roughly 34% of the population. Similarly, Latino residents in Santa Clara County and San Diego County have been getting vaccinated at disproportionately low levels. Among doses where ethnicity data is known, Black, Latino and Asian residents in Alameda County are also receiving fewer doses compared to their respective population sizes.

Critically, many dashboards have noted a large percentage of doses where ethnicity data is unavailable. In Alameda County, for example, ethnicity data is unknown for nearly 50,000 shots given, or about 26% of all doses administered.

Still, the trend thus far is already troubling for some community advocates and health experts, especially as COVID-19 continues to hit communities of color and low-income neighborhoods hard nearly a full year into the pandemic. For example, Black, Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native residents in the United States are dying from COVID-19 at a rate nearly three times that of white residents, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate.

“If we truly want to be equitable, we have to hold ourselves accountable, and that means showing us the information,” Rios said.

In Sacramento County, the 7-day average positivity rate — the percentage of all tests returning positive — is now under 8%, a state benchmark for reducing COVID-19 restrictions. But tests in the county’s most under resourced neighborhoods are coming back positive at a higher rate. Just in the last month, the 95823 ZIP code, which includes Valley Hi and Parkway, has seen 914 new cases, more than any other ZIP code in the county.

Sacramento County residents have complained about the labyrinthian challenge of finding available vaccines, and the ever-changing rules from the state determining who is eligible to receive them. That, combined with limited healthcare access, job and transportation barriers, historical mistrust in medical institutions and a lack of public outreach, could all put an equitable vaccine rollout in jeopardy.

“My frustration as well as my concern is if we don’t do something now like vaccinate the population that’s highest risk, we’re going to see even more disproportionate deaths in the Black and brown community,” said Sacramento NAACP president Betty Williams on Wednesday, standing in front of the WellSpace Health center on Stockton Boulevard that serves a neighborhood of mostly low-income, residents of color. “This is the place we need to start if we’re going to make a difference.”

This story was originally published February 11, 2021 at 5:00 AM.