Gov. Gavin Newsom said in Stockton Thursday that a new plan to set aside vaccine doses for people who live in disproportionally impacted communities would help confront COVID-19 inequities and also help the state in its reopening efforts.
He said the state’s plan to set aside 40% of all vaccine doses for people who live in neighborhoods most vulnerable to impacts from the pandemic would “make real progress.”
“We’re not meeting our goals,” Newsom said of the state’s current efforts that partner with 337 community organizations.
“We have to be bolder and we have to go bigger in terms of our resolve and our commitment,” he said.
The doses will be spread out among 400 ZIP codes with about 8 million people eligible for shots, Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s health and human services secretary, said on Wednesday.
“With vaccines still scarce, we must target vaccines strategically to maximally reduce transmission, protect our healthcare delivery system and save lives,” Ghaly said in a briefing.
Many of the neighborhoods are concentrated in Los Angeles County and the Central Valley, which have had among the highest rates of infection. The areas are considered most vulnerable based on metrics such as household income, education level, housing status and access to transportation.
While race and ethnicity are not explicit factors in designating vaccinations, the 400 vulnerable ZIP codes overlap heavily with neighborhoods with higher populations of Blacks, Latinos and Asian and Pacific Islanders, officials said.
Once 2 million vaccine doses are given out in those neighborhoods, the state will make it easier for counties to move through reopening tiers that dictate business and school reopenings.
Right now, a county can move from the most restrictive purple tier to the lower red tier based on several metrics, including having seven or fewer new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people per day over a period of several weeks. That metric will change to 10 new cases or fewer. In the red tier, businesses such as restaurants and gyms can open for indoor services at limited capacity.
Also in the red tier, schools that want to access new state funding must provide in-person learning for students in transitional kindergarten through grade six and at least one grade each in middle and high school.
About 1.6 million vaccine doses already have been given to people in those 400 ZIP codes, and the state will hit the 2 million mark in the next week or two, officials said.
Once the state gives out 4 million doses in those neighborhoods, it will revise the metrics for getting into the even less restrictive orange and yellow tiers.
Newsom said while visiting Stribley Community Center on Thursday that the state’s test positivity rate had fallen to 2.1% from 6.1% a month ago. New COVID-19 cases were just over 3,500 on Thursday, down from more than 13,000 a month ago, he said.
–KCRA 3 contributed to this story.
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