FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 26, 2021
Data Shows Higher Rates of Vaccination for Hispanic/Latinx Population
The County of Santa Clara recently determined that data on the race/ethnicity of most Latinos who received the COVID-19 vaccine from Kaiser Permanente was automatically being replaced with “other” or “non-Hispanic” when transferred into the California Immunization Registry (CAIR). Working in partnership with Kaiser, the County has corrected the race/ethnicity information for these Kaiser patients in the County’s vaccine dashboards, resulting in more than 22,000 additional Hispanic/Latino community members who have received at least one dose on the County’s Vaccination Dashboard as of today.
To ensure that all Hispanic/Latino community members who have been vaccinated were identified, the County compared data from the California Immunization Registry (CAIR) to data received directly from Kaiser. Kaiser’s system for collecting data on race/ethnicity enables patients to report more information on race/ethnicity, including their country of origin. By contrast, the State CAIR database classifies Hispanic/Latino only as an ethnicity and not a race and does not accept country of origin in the ethnicity field.
Robust data validation and data analysis like the ones that identified this issue are key tools to understand and address the disparate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the community. Better understanding of vaccination rates for the Hispanic/Latino community is critical to inform strategies that will ensure equity in vaccination and other responses to the pandemic.
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