Community leaders in Stockton give thumbs-up to county, city vaccine roll out
Some community activists want even more collaboration with the county to get the vaccine in the arms of lower income neighborhoods Author: Kurt Rivera Updated: 7:39 PM PDT April 7, 2021
STOCKTON, Calif. A retired caregiver and medical biller from Tracy, 62-year-old Anna Dela Rosa is thrilled that she got her Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 shot.
She got vaccinated at the new Stockton Arena COVID-10 vaccine hub run by Kaiser Permanente.
Emily Dianda, mother of twins and personal trainer, got vaccinated too. Super easy. No thinking involved. You just type in your stuff and they direct you where to go, Dianda said about the experience.
Maggie Park says she remembers dreading San Joaquin County s first COVID-19 deaths when the pandemic started. There have since been more than 1,200.
She asked the county s Board of Supervisors at its meeting Tuesday to just let that number sink in as the one-year anniversary of the coronavirus pandemic was now upon them. It really makes me think of all the lives affected by those losses, said Park, who started the pandemic as the county s interim public health officer before the board voted her permanently into the role about two months later.
Wednesday also marked another somber moment for San Joaquin County the start of the pandemic.
San Joaquin County is weighing a challenge to the state s decision to hand over logistics of California s vaccine distribution efforts to Blue Shield of California.
Chuck Davis can tell almost anyone in California how ill they d become if infected by COVID-19. He says low-income residents and minority communities are most at risk.
Davis is the chief executive officer of Bayesiant, a company that collects proprietary data on individuals. He has worked closely with San Joaquin County Public Health Services since the beginning of the pandemic, using his company s data reservoir to make prediction models about COVID-19 rates of infections and hospitalizations in the county and more specifically, who the disease is most likely to make really sick.
Of the more than 230 San Joaquin County residents who died from COVID-19 in December, Davis says only eight of those deaths were not ones he could have predicted.