The state’s plan to distribute more Covid-19 vaccines to more vulnerable, harder-to-reach areas has skipped over South County, but local officials are hoping to change that.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a plan earlier this week to set aside 40 percent of vaccine doses for communities in the lowest quartile of the California Healthy Places Index, which provides overall scores and data that predict life expectancy and compare community conditions that shape health such as education levels and income, among other things.
But the plan, which Newsom pitched as a way for the state to prioritize disadvantaged and Latino communities that have seen a disproportionate impact from the pandemic, would not apply to South County—which has been more impacted by Covid-19 than most other areas of Santa Clara County. Some U.S. Census tracts in the county are in the lowest quartile of the HPI, but the state’s plan determines who qualifies by zip code—a much larger geographical area than a Census tract.
Bay Area lawmakers were ready to hold a press conference on March 8 to call on state officials to alter the plan, where Morgan Hill Mayor Rich Constantine and Gilroy City Council member Rebeca Armendariz were scheduled to speak, but abruptly canceled the gathering to instead reportedly meet with those representatives.
Constantine said representatives from the county and its cities had asked state officials to more narrowly focus the vaccination distribution plan by changing the way they gather data by Census tract, instead of zip code. Morgan Hill only has one zip code, but it has eight Census tracts.
“To my pleasant surprise, they had already started working on tracts instead of zip, and they asked for more time to make that work,” Constantine said. “They are listening to our concerns. I am hoping they will find a more equitable way to distribute the vaccines. We need to make sure the vaccine gets to the people who need it most.”
Only two percent of Bay Area residents qualify for the state’s plan. That’s despite the fact that the Bay Area makes up 20 percent of California’s population, and that several communities have been deeply impacted by the pandemic both economically and health-wise, lawmakers stated in a press release.
Santa Clara County has no zip codes that qualify for the plan, according to a data sheet obtained by this publication that shows in which HPI quartile every California zip code stands.
Virus highlights disparities
Morgan Hill is second only to Gilroy in terms of cities with the highest rates of Covid-19 spread. Data by Census tract—which the county started releasing locally earlier this year—also shows that wealthier neighborhoods of Morgan Hill have lower rates of infection and coronavirus positivity.
Census tract 5123.08—which includes northeastern Morgan Hill up into the foothills on East Dunne Avenue—is the wealthiest area in Morgan Hill, with a median income of $184,091, according to Census data. It is also one of the least infected tracts in Morgan Hill, with a Covid-19 case rate of 4,998 cases per 100,000 residents and a test positivity rate of 4.4 percent.
Morgan Hill’s overall Covid-19 case rate is 7,799 cases per 100,000 residents.
In Census tract 5123.08, 77 percent of residents age 65 and older have been vaccinated. That rate hovers between 58 and 87 percent among Morgan Hill’s eight Census tracts. The county’s Census tract dashboard, which is updated weekly, only tracks vaccinations administered to senior citizens. Farmworkers, educators, childcare and other sectors only became eligible for the vaccine in Santa Clara County on Feb. 28.
The three poorest Census tracts in Morgan Hill have median household incomes just below $82,000, and these have the highest Covid-19 case rates, according to the county’s data.
In Census tract 5123.13—on the west side of town, south of West Dunne and West Edmundson avenues—is the highest case rate in Morgan Hill, with 11,163 cases per 100,000 as of March 10. The test positivity rate in this tract is 9.7 percent.
The median household income in Census tract 5123.13 is $81,579 and nine percent of households are in poverty, according to Census data. Nearly 28 percent of residents are foreign-born—also the highest percentage among Morgan Hill’s Census tracts. Sixty-five percent of the area’s senior citizens have received at least one dose of the vaccine. The tract is also Morgan Hill’s most densely populated, with 3.32 residents per household.
Populations of senior citizens within Census tracts does not seem to correlate directly to vaccination rates for these residents in Morgan Hill. The lowest vaccination rate in Morgan Hill is 58 percent in Census tract 5123.11 on the north side of town. Senior citizens make up 16.9 percent of that tract.
However, the Census tract with the highest vaccination rate of 87 percent—tract 5123.09—is only 15.4 percent senior citizens.
According to state data, 40 percent of Covid-19 cases and deaths have occurred in the lowest quartile of the HPI. The rate of infections for households making less than $40,000 per year (11.3 percent) is more than double that of households with an income of $120,000 or more (5.2 percent). At the same time, California’s wealthiest populations are being vaccinated at nearly twice the rate of its most vulnerable populations.
Newsom also emphasized the toll the pandemic has had on Latino communities. According to state data, about 55 percent of the state’s 3.5 million cases have been in people of Latino descent. Those Californians have also accounted for roughly 46 percent of the state’s 54,000 Covid-19-related deaths.
Local data closely mirrors those numbers. In Santa Clara County, Latinos have accounted for nearly 51 percent of the total 111,952 cases since March 2020, despite making up only a quarter of the total population. About 28 percent of the total 1,827 deaths as of March 8 have been people of Latino descent.
Tony Nunez and Erik Chalhoub contributed to this report.
