Low vaccination rates in several pockets of the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood could help explain persistently high cases of Covid-19 in San Francisco’s southeast, recently released data indicates.
Neighborhood-level numbers show the Bayview’s overall vaccination rate of 88 percent is on par with the most vaccinated areas in the city. But the data released this week shows a large disparity in the percentage of vaccinated residents among different census tracts, revealing where most of the Bayview’s thousands of unvaccinated residents are probably located.
Local organizations have been requesting this information, which is publicly available from at least one other Bay Area county, for months, to better target their vaccination outreach. After releasing the data to the Public Press last week, officials shared an updated version with Bayview community groups Tuesday.
“Particularly of concern is that we need to advocate very hard at increasing testing in those places with extremely low vaccination rates, because we want to help the community protect itself,” said Michelle Pierce, executive director of the Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates. “This really allows us to concentrate in those areas.”
In a written statement, the San Francisco Department of Public Health said it has been sharing this information with local groups since May.
“SFDPH works with a wider group of community partners, many of which may not attend the weekly coordination meetings and may not necessarily have seen the data presentations shared at those convenings,” the statement read.
Prior to Tuesday’s meeting, Dr. Kim Rhoads, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, also said she had not seen census-tract-level vaccination data for San Francisco and, to her knowledge, neither had the groups attending the weekly meetings. Rhoads has been attending them since early August, she said.
As this article pointed out with its 88% stat (it’s actually 90% according to the City.gov’s own website at https://sf.gov/data/covid-19-vaccinations-neighborhood), Bayview as a whole has one of the highest vaccination rates of any neighborhood in San Francisco.
While I believe it’s important to find ways to improve vaccination rates throughout the city, San Francisco has been putting an enormous amount of effort in Bayview specifically, thanks to the many testing and vaccination centers that were put up early in the pandemic, as well as granting the neighborhood early access to COVID vaccination for ages 16+.
I applaud efforts to move the city as close to 100% vaccination as possible, particularly in communities that historically have had minimal or sub-par health care infrastructure. However, there are other neighborhoods in this city that currently have significantly lower vaccination rates than Bayview and I believe the city should do more to address those areas in a targeted fashion as well. 47 square miles isn’t that big, and it doesn’t take much for an infected person in one neighborhood to travel to another.