This seemed like a discouraging headline when I came across it yesterday. But, RI went from a rank of 50th, with respect to vaccine distribution, to 7th place most recently. And, when vaccination is by appointment, no long lines for hours at a time. It was very smooth at CVS. But, we are 47th in terms of the number of deaths, and number of infections, per 100,000 residents. Not good. We are still very rural in many areas, but where people do live in cities, the population is very dense, packed in like sardines. One way we differed, which this article highlights, is our state health department decided to target particularly hard hit communities. In other words, age or profession did not matter. If you live, or work, in the hard hit community, get in line. For example, Central Falls is a city of exactly one square mile. Heavily Hispanic. And, 16,000 people living in that one square mile!! And we targeted certain professions, health care workers being the most obvious. As a result, we were slower targeting by age, and of course many seniors fretted over this. But the pace has picked up.
A dense population of vulnerable citizens set the stage for a frightening epidemic.
www.nytimes.com
The fall chill sent people indoors, where risk from the virus is highest, and the holidays brought people together. Rhode Island is tiny — you can traverse it in 45 minutes. But crammed into that smallish area are a million people, for a population density second only to that of New Jersey. If everyone in the world is connected by six degrees of separation, Rhode Islanders seem to be connected by maybe two.
Central Falls, the epicenter of Rhode Island’s epidemic, has a density of 16,000 people per square mile, almost twice that of Providence. “Just imagine, 16,000 people per square mile — I mean, that’s amazing,” said Dr. Pablo Rodriguez, a member of the government committee that guides Covid vaccine distribution in Rhode Island. “It doesn’t take much for the spark to create an outbreak.”
www.politico.com
