What’s stopping Hamilton hot spots from getting vaccinated?
As the city continues to try to improve vaccination rates with COVID cases on the rise, two Hamilton organizations have received federal funding to help better understand who isn't vaccinated and why.
Compass Community Health and Hamilton Urban Core Community Health Centre are reaching out to communities with low vaccination rates in the city.
Funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada, both groups have hired a staff member each for the project. Compass will focus on L8L - the postal code with Hamilton's lowest vaccination rate, at 59 per cent first dose coverage and 48 per cent fully vaccinated. Hamilton Urban Core is focused on Black and marginalized residents downtown.
We are hoping to understand why we have lower numbers in this community relative to the rest of the city," said Jenna McHugh, the community development worker at Compass who's charged with the L8L project.
Daily vaccination rates in the city have been holding at less than 2,000 doses per day for almost two weeks. Meanwhile, Hamilton must vaccinate roughly 24,000 more residents to achieve a 75 per cent two-dose coverage rate overall.
That's not even counting the city's goal to reach 75 per cent full coverage in each forward sortation area (the first three characters of a postal code).
The challenges people face can vary, said Kathy Allan-Fleet, CEO of Compass. She noted multiple pop-up clinics were organized in L8L to improve access, but the neighbourhood continues to lag.
We needed to ensure that we continue to look at other factors beyond just accessibility to truly understand what the barriers (are) that individuals were facing," she said.
For some, technology is the biggest hurdle. For others, it might be a language barrier. And for some still, it could be a combination of factors, including child care and a distrust of the health-care system driven by racism.
We're not blaming people for not being vaccinated," Allan-Fleet said. We know that there are many barriers for people to access health care."
Not only will the staff members try to better understand those barriers, but Jude Nnamchi of Hamilton Urban Core said they will also train communities to share information on their own. For example, he hopes the project will help communities set up virtual platforms where they can share information in their own language.
When they're well-informed, they can make their own decision to get vaccinated," he said.
A recent study from the University of Western Ontario reinforces why it's important to understand disparities across neighbourhoods. A data analysis of COVID rates and vaccine uptake in Toronto neighbourhoods found residents of COVID hot spots continued to face a disproportionate risk of getting the virus even after vaccination rates improved.
The associate professor who led the study, Kate Choi, said that's because low-income, immigrant and racialized residents tend to have jobs where they are less able to work remotely, and are more likely to live in overcrowded housing and denser neighbourhoods.
All of these things increase the likelihood that they will have greater exposure to COVID-19," said the director of Western's Centre for Research on Social Inequality.
The study also found that immigrant communities not only had a low vaccine uptake initially, but that their vaccination rate grew more slowly than other groups.
(It) would suggest that in terms of vaccination, immigrant communities have been left behind," Choi said.
Maria Iqbal is a Hamilton-based reporter at The Spectator covering aging. Reach her via email: miqbal@thespec.com.