California – and especially the Bay Area – continue to make remarkable progress against COVID-19, with fewer people in the hospital and steadily dropping rates of virus transmission.
But there are pockets of California where the opposite is true.
In the far northern part of the state and the Central Valley, vaccination rates remain low and hospitals are overwhelmed.
Fresno County is one of those places.
ICUs are packed and there's a shortage of hospital beds and ambulances. The delta variant continues to surge there and the pandemic remains an urgent crisis. "This month has been really, really hard in the (Central Valley)," Dr. Kenny Banh, associate professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine at UCSF, told KCBS Radio on Wednesday.
There are fewer doctors, hospitals and clinics there compared to urban population centers like San Francisco, which could be one factor for the surge in cases, said Banh. Another might be the larger population of undocumented minorities and refugees.
"Ultimately, there is still a lot more vaccine resistance as well as (it's) a geopolitically different area in our region," he added.
About 54 percent of those eligible in Fresno County have been vaccinated with at least one dose, per county data. That total is well under highly vaccinated Bay Area counties like Marin and San Mateo.
Banh directs the Mobile Health and Learning COVID-19 Equity Project, managing the region's largest vaccination and testing site.
He's also pulling extra shifts in the emergency room at the trauma center there and seeing delta’s toll on Californians up close. "I see COVID in all of its forms from the benign and the asymptomatic to the unfortunately mortal and death at the end," he said. "It's unfortunate that people have to see that to...change people's minds, but we certainly have had some come around and have had an uptick in vaccinations in the last two months."
Fresno County is reporting 32 new cases per 100,000 people per day on a seven-day average, according to the county's COVID-19 dashboard. Neighboring counties like Madera, Kings, Tulare and Merced ranked higher with more cases per 100,000 people over the same period.
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