FEATURE

GROUND ZERO Data shows the infection rate per capita in East Oakland is higher than 4 percent in three zip codes.

Ride The Wave

Data shows the coronavirus pandemic has hit East Oakland communities of color harder than any other place in the Bay Area BY JOSH KOEHN

Our sense of shame is in short supply.

As of Tuesday, the coronavirus pandemic had killed more than 226,000 people across the United States, 17,000-plus in California and almost 1,750 here in the Bay Area. Of that amount, 461 people—or about 26 percent— resided in Alameda County. That local figure is nearly a hundred more people than the number claimed by the virus in midSeptember. But finding out exactly who is dying in the East Bay, and where each person took that last breath, is more difficult to pinpoint.

Data compiled by Alameda County health officials show that the coronavirus has hit predominantly low-income communities of color in East Oakland harder than any other place in the Bay Area. Maps that track infections in the 94601, 94621 and 94603 zip codes—starting in the Meadow Brook and Oak Tree neighborhoods and running south down the Interstate 880 corridor to the Coliseum and Brookfield—show a deep shade of blue that inspires none of the optimism one might hope for in a consequential election season.

Each of these East Oakland zip codes is registering more than 4,300 positive cases per 100,000 residents, which is more than double most other parts of the county. By comparison, the next highest rate of positive tests in Alameda County can be found in two zip codes in Hayward, where 2,612 and 2,345 per 100,000 have tested positive. No other zip codes in the county surpass an infection rate of >8

VOTE OUT THE VIRUS The nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been top of mind for many voters, especially those socially distancing while they wait in line.

<7 2 percent. The only place in the Bay Area area that comes close to the rate of cases seen in East Oakland is in San Francisco’s Bayview/HuntersPoint, also a traditionally Black neighborhood.

But how many people have died from coronavirus in East Oakland? That’s a trickier question.

The county’s COVID-19 dashboard doesn’t list locations for deaths, but simply tracks them over time. State records show that about 30 percent of all deaths in the county—139 men and women— occurred in skilled nursing homes. A public records request filed by the East Bay Express found that as of Tuesday, 65 people had been killed by the virus in the three East Oakland zip codes where infection has run rampant, accounting for 14 percent of the county’s total dead. The county rates of covidrelated death among Black people (52 per 100,000) and Latinos (34.7 per 100,000), as expected, are disproportionately high.

But the extent of the problem in local coronavirus hot spots could be greater than even known. Alameda County health officials admit that the number of cases in the three mostimpacted East Oakland zip codes are likely higher due to an imbalance of testing rates in these places compared to high infection rates.

“I think that’s a problem and it’s a real problem we’ve been attempting to address with our testing program and where we’ve invested our own resources both financial resources and efforts to bring other testing programs into play,” says Dr. Nicholas Moss, an infectious disease expert and Alameda County’s interim health officer. “It hasn’t been enough when you look at these maps to change the testing rate, though it’s not due to a lack of effort.”

At least not on the county’s part.

The most ludicrous aspect of the U.S. response to the pandemic, which perhaps rivals only Sweden in its refusal to mandate mitigation efforts in accordance with readily available science, has been the fact that since mid-March, county and state health departments have been leading the charge in issuing health orders and coordinating testing and tracing efforts. The result over the last seven months has been a haphazard mashup of data dashboards in which counties are left to their own devices to conduct contact tracing while compiling information that can’t be easily cross-referenced.

State officials have coordinated with counties on testing and signing off on reopenings, but California’s role has essentially been to act as a monitor and personal protective equipment facilitator. Meanwhile, Trump continues to claim victory in the face of nearly a quartermillion dead as his campaign hosts superspreader events and the Republican-led Senate prioritizes the appointment of a ultra-conservative Supreme Court judge over passing covid-relief and stimulus package.

The only reason the public

has gained even an opaque understanding of the crisis is thanks to medical experts, the media and counties, which, in partnership with public health systems, private hospitals, community health clinics, nonprofits and churches, have been given the Herculean task of coordinating a testing program on the fly. Parsing through the data, however, has been mostly left to doctors and journalists who have tracked the pandemic’s deadly toll, day by day, in a time-consuming process that was made difficult by design—in the sense that not having a federal plan means never having to admit the nation has failed.

It’s an uncomfortable conversation that most public health officials would rather not have.

“Look, there’s no question we would have loved to get more resources, earlier access to more testing supplies and more consistency around guidance, but that said we’re not going to wait around for everything to be perfect,” Moss says. “We’re going to take the resources that we do have and the resources that we do get and try to do the best for our county residents. You know, I think, it’s not helpful for—it doesn’t help us get any more work done if we, sort of, complain about the shortcomings of the federal government.”

Perhaps, but a second spike is occurring across the nation—cases recently jumped to a new record of about 68,767 each day over a week-long period, according to Johns Hopkins University. As covid fatigue sets in among the public, and as the holiday gatherings and flu season concurrently approach, it’s worth questioning whether the situation in East Oakland and other heavily impacted areas will slide back and deteriorate while the world waits on a vaccine, which by most estimates won’t be widely distributed until a year from now.

The rate of testing per capita in East Oakland—more than eight months after the virus began its spread through Santa Clara County and spread like wildfire across the region—still severely trails places like Berkeley, Emeryville and Piedmont, and even other parts of Oakland in which the outbreak has not registered to such a great extent. Why residents of the Oakland Hills have been given more tests per capita than East Oakland is a subject for debate.

Without a national plan for testing in place, higher-income communities have had greater access from the beginning. In some ways, according to local health officials, the issue of testing becomes a chicken-or-the-egg discussion on why people fall ill in a broken American health care system that insulates and remedies those who can afford better insurance.

“That is like a question for the ages, because the testing rates are driven by the consumer,” says Dr. Jocelyn Freeman Garrick, who serves as the deputy medical director of Alameda County Emergency Medical Services and is leading the county’s testing operations.

But as an emergency physician at Highland Hospital, Freeman Garrick has seen firsthand how systemic racism has largely created the structural barriers that stop people from getting adequate education and housing opportunities, and by extension health care treatment, which then bleeds over to “distrust among community members to come forward and be tested.”

In the first weeks of the pandemic and subsequent shelter-in-place orders, East Oakland zip codes were seeing infection rates as high as 30 percent among those tested, Freeman Garrick says, but that number has since dropped down to about 5 percent.

“I think the health department did a good job of prioritizing and allowing me in this role to focus on our vulnerable populations, so that we could try to address covid in an equitable way,” Freeman Garrick says.

County health officials have partnered with East Oakland clinics to do “community-based testing,” as well as with churches, but officials quickly found that they needed to get “community buy-in and partners in the community

HOUSE BLUES Health experts say the prolonged effect of staying indoors during the pandemic has led to an uptick in mental health crises.

to encourage testing,” Freeman Garrick says. “Our disenfranchised communities have distrust. We still have access issues.”

By the middle of October, about 4,400 people a day were being tested in Alameda County. Dr. Freeman Garrick hopes to ramp that up above 6,000 tests a day with an increase in mobile testing. This will require continued collaboration with clinics like Roots Community Health Center and walk-up testing at churches like Christian Tabernacle on Walnut Street.

“We have to be creative with this pandemic and use this to prepare for the future, because, unfortunately, with global warming and the pandemic — this is a sign of the future,” Freeman Garrick says. “We can’t just rely on the federal government to respond to this disaster. If we can be creative with publicprivate ventures, with better allocation of resources, we have to do that.”

Regardless of election outcomes, a second wave of the virus is expected to hit this winter, which could lead to less obvious—but just as dire— impacts on public health.

Freeman Garrick says county data shows the number of psychotic episodes and cases of depression have increased as people who live alone or with just one other person remain isolated, and parents and children continue to feel overwhelmed with remote school instruction.

“I’m concerned we’re not talking about that enough,” she says. “We’re talking a lot about testing and numbers and here’s where we are with deaths, but there are people who are living and (we’re not talking about) the impact of covid on them.”

Alameda County offers mental health services to those in crisis at the phone number 800.491.9099. More information can be found at acbhcs.org/crisisinformation.