San Mateo County has failed in their job as public health officer for East Palo Alto. There is practically no COVID health education, no mask distribution, no information on social media platforms or public notices in Spanish, absolutely nothing in Tongan or Samoan. It isn't surprising that we have seen the highest COVID numbers in the Bay Area. People in EPA are still under the impression that COVID is spread via surfaces (it is not!) and do not understand the importance of ventilation in an aerosol spread disease. Testing has been fairly good, but focusing on testing without having a complete public health strategy is a prescription for the failure we see every week in high numbers of positive test results. COVID was going to hit EPA hard due to the nature of the community (overcrowded housing and front line workers) but it did not need to be this bad.

A disproportionate number of the dead are white (45% of the deaths but only 19% of the cases). Does Shireen Malekafzali have anything to say about this "inequity"?

@joseph davis,
I’m sure she would say what most medical professionals would say - show me the age/comorbidity-adjusted mortality rates. Your comparison is meaningless without accounting for those dominant factors.

Counting lives of the victims is important, and the data suggests Latino/Hispanic COVID cases AND DEATHS are under-represented in the official numbers, which currently show 6.8 TIMES the number of white folks dying vs. LatinX folks.

As of Dec 24 With 10,203 Latino/Hispanic cases there have been 47 deaths or one-half of 1 percent. With 3,134 white cases there have been 98 deaths or 3.1 percent.

With big numbers (22,341 cases) should come data reliability, BUT these numbers are not consistent with anything else produced in the state. Take a look at Los Angeles County. It has 3.4 percent white deaths, which is consistent, and 1.7 percent Latinx dead, which is inconsistent, with San Mateo County data.

It is probable that significantly more LatinX people are dying of COVID in San Mateo County than is being reported.

Conversely if I am wrong, and SMC has somehow discovered the secret to keeping far more LatinX people with COVID alive than in any other county in California, that too should be shared.

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