Health officials trying to boost COVID-19 vaccination rates in Northern California's Butte County are faced with the reality that only 227,000 residents are fully vaccinated, leaving it 20 percentage points behind the overall vaccination rate.
“The conversation about COVID-19 has reached a standstill, and there’s a denial of the issue,” said Maya Klein, 16, a Butte resident at a briefing in collaboration with the Sierra Health Foundation, the California Department of Public Health and Ethnic Media Services. There, experts in the field discussed the struggle to recover from the devastating Dixie wildfires that are becoming an annual disaster, coupled with the challenges they face like any other community.
The new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes COVID-19 disease - first reported, according to scientific research, in the central Wuhan region of China - forced the World Health Organization (WHO) to set the start of the COVID-19 pandemic for March 11, 2020.
Since then, governments around the world have established new health security measures that, to date, have changed people's habits; in addition to biosecurity measures, people were urged to stay at home and work remotely; that is, to assume a teleworking and online classes scheme; however, the latter could not be applied in Butte due to the threat of forest fires.
Testimonies about the most devastating wildfires that have occurred in California, cause displacement among other problems such as the reconstruction of homes and productive buildings. It should be noted that the COVID-19 problem in the region is found in people who have opted for measures other than vaccination. Residents say that people no longer wear masks and that they feel indifferent to the restrictions, especially among the white population.
Gridley Councilman Angel Calderon said: “We have the highest infection rate in the county.” The problem occurs in people who have positive COVID-19 diagnoses and prefer not to isolate themselves from others as a precautionary measure against contagion; he also pointed out that the Latino community finds it very difficult to cover the expenses required by the disease if they do not continue with productive work. And, in terms of public policies for these people, they are stagnant because the majority of the population are undocumented immigrants.
Victor Rodriguez, from the county health department, provided information on how to get vaccinated on websites in English, Spanish and Hmong to bridge the language gap at: https://www.buttecounty.net/publichealth/COVID19 Such information can also be obtained by phone at: (833) 422-4255
