California's Approach To COVID

Above is a typical table of the type that can be found on the LA County Health Department website. It's updated daily. It appears that LA County's policies conform with California state policies. It's plain that LA County is carefully recording race, ethnicity, and poverty data on COVID cases. In general I would have questioned this before the current crisis, but what we see in just the death data is an indication of where the problems lie.

If you run vaccination clinics in poor Hispanic areas, you are going to do far more good with each shot there than in an affluenmt white area. That's all there is to it. So I quote from a recent LA County health department press release:

Testing results are available for nearly 6,272,000 individuals with 18% of people testing positive. Today's daily test positivity rate is 1%, the lowest test positivity rate since the beginning of the pandemic. The test positivity rate peaked over 20% in late-December during the surge.

Nearly 5,400,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered to people across Los Angeles County. Of these, nearly 3,500,000 were first doses and more than 1,900,000 were second doses. As of April 9, 71% of L.A. County residents 65 and older received at least one dose of the vaccine. In total, 41% of the County’s population 16 and older have received at least one dose of vaccine.

Los Angeles County expanded the number of sites offering vaccination services across the county from 566 locations last week to 709 vaccinations sites across the county this week; 266 sites are in the hardest hit communities. Vaccination sites across the county had capacity to administer nearly 734,000 doses this week. This week, 323,470 total doses were allocated to Los Angeles County.

There's an emerging consensus that California's COVID statistics are the best in the US. I simply don't know if other states are following similar policies. It does seem to me that the CDC ought to have data eqwuivalent to LA County's or California's for every state, and it ought to be asking whether every state, especially those that are now problem outliers like Michigan, are handing vaccinations the same way.

Clearfly s "preferential option for the poor" is a good strategy for society in general here.

I spent the weekend getting and installing a new desktop, as my old one died. I'm back up and fully running.