California has reached a milestone with more than 70% of eligible residents at least partly vaccinated, driven by many Bay Area counties that have topped the 80% mark, yet immunization remains highly varied around the Golden State as it does across the rest of the country.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday noted the state’s progress inoculating residents 12 and older and credited recent incentives like drawings for cash prizes and vacations with boosting vaccination 22% over a one-week period.
The 70% figure is important because the more people who are immunized against COVID-19, the harder it is for the virus to spread, as the vaccines provide strong protection against infection and serious illness. Though infection rates have plummeted in most of the U.S., the disease continues to spread in some states and around the world, driven by aggressive variants.
That has concerned health experts such as Dr. Bob Wachter, chair of the medical department at the University of California, San Francisco, who said Monday on Twitter that we’re still in a race against COVID-19 variants, particularly the aggressive Delta variant first identified in India. He said he was “surprised by how bad Delta is” and “shocked” at the number of “people saying no to vaccines.”
President Joe Biden has set a goal of 70% of U.S. adults having at least one vaccine dose by July 4. The U.S. stands at 65.4% of adults at least partly vaccinated — meaning they have at least one of two-dose Pfizer or Moderna vaccines — and California has already hit the mark at 73.2%.
Health experts have estimated anywhere from 70% or more of the total population would need to be inoculated or already infected to provide “herd immunity” and prevent the disease from continuing to spread.
Fewer than half of all U.S. residents (45.2%) and Californians (48.3%) are fully vaccinated with two shots. Just 16 states are over the 50% mark.
California, with 70.4% of those 12 and older receiving at least one shot, is among a dozen states with more than 70% of those eligible having had at least one dose, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The highest rate is in Vermont, where 82.9% of those eligible have had at least one shot. Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Maryland and Washington also are over 70%.
Fewer than half the eligible residents of 10 states have been at least partly immunized: Mississippi (41.8%), Louisiana (44.4%), Wyoming (45.5%), Alabama (45.7%), Idaho (46.7%), Tennessee (47.9%), Arkansas (48.5%), West Virginia (49.2%), Georgia (49.6%) and South Carolina (49.9%).
High vaccine acceptance in the Bay Area helped propel California’s overall vaccination rate. CDC data show several Bay Area counties have more than 80% of those eligible receiving at least one shot: Marin (87.6%), Santa Clara (83.8%), San Mateo (82.8%) and San Francisco (81.8%).
“That’s really admirable, it’s amazing, and I’m really pleased with that,” Dr. Marty Fenstersheib, Santa Clara County’s COVID-19 vaccine officer, told the board of supervisors Tuesday about the county topping 80%.
Even so, with 1.9 million residents living in the county, that means about 400,000 have yet to receive any shots.
“We’re continuing to do critical outreach in communities that were hit hardest by the pandemic and have had barriers to receiving the COVID-19 vaccine,” Fenstersheib said.
Several other Bay Area counties have also reached the 70% milestone of at least one shot among eligible residents, including Alameda (78.9%) and Contra Costa (75.5%).
But immunization rates among those eligible are lower in many of the state’s most populous southern and inland counties, including Los Angeles (66.4%), Orange (68.1%), Riverside (52.9%) and San Bernardino (51.2%).
And the rate is far lower in many of the state’s rural counties: 31.6% in Lassen, 36.7% in Tehama, 37.1% in Del Norte, 41.1% in Kings, 45.5% in Yuba, 46.9% in Shasta.
The CDC did not have data for Alpine, Inyo, Mariposa, Modoc, Mono, Plumas, Sierra or Trinity counties.
Some of the CDC’s reported figures are suspect. The CDC reported that 96.7% of people in San Diego and 74.3% in Imperial counties had received at least one shot. But San Diego’s Health and Human Services agency reported the figure as 67.9%, and data provided by the state’s Department of Public Health put it at 80.8%, and for Imperial County, 69.5%.
The CDC says it determined the number of people receiving at least one dose and the number of people who are fully vaccinated based on information reported by state, territorial, tribal and local public health agencies and federal entities. Because the method used to determine dose numbers needs to be applied across multiple jurisdictions with different reporting practices, CDC’s dose number estimates might differ from other reports.
Regardless of the data source, however, all show wide gaps between states nationally and within counties in California.
There also remains a gulf between the percentage of those who are eligible and partly vaccinated, a gauge governments use to track how well they’re doing getting shots into arms, and the percentage of the total population that is fully vaccinated, which measures how many people remain vulnerable to infection. Children under 12 and people with impaired health aren’t eligible or recommended for the vaccines.
But Fenstersheib noted that Santa Clara County has the 17th highest rate of full vaccination among all 3,000 U.S. counties of any size and the highest among counties over 1.5 million residents, having a fully vaccinated rate of over 71%.
“That,” he said, “is a great accomplishment.”
