Recent health statistics suggest the Curtis Park area is well on the way to the COVID-19 vaccination level thought to be needed to provide “herd immunity,” the vaccination rate needed so that new infections will decrease naturally.
The fully vaccinated rate has exceeded 73% of the population age 16 or over, with another 6% having received a first dose.
Once vaccinations took hold, the progress against COVID infection was rapid. COVID-19 rates in 95818, as measured by the number of new daily infections per 100,000 people, went from eight in early May to about five in late May, to about two during the first three weeks of June.
In February, Viewpoint reported that the 95818 area had fared much better than some neighboring ZIP codes – 95811, 95816, 95817, 95820 and 95822 – during Sacramento’s December-January COVID-19 surge. However, when looked at over the 15-month course of the pandemic, the local performance, while better than average, was not exceptional.
Since the pandemic began in March 2020, a total of 951 positive cases, infecting 4.4% of the area’s population, were detected in the 95818 area. This was slightly higher than the 3.7% rate in East Sacramento, but below the 6.8% average in other adjacent ZIP codes and the 7% rate in the city overall. However, it is similar to the 4.8% rate in the part of Sacramento County outside of the City of Sacramento, and slightly below the 5.6% rate in the six Bay Area counties.
Curtis Park has about 5,000 residents and shares the 95818 ZIP code with another 17,000 residents of the Land Park, Newton Booth and Poverty Ridge neighborhoods. Statistics on COVID-19 infections and vaccinations are not available publicly for smaller areas than the full ZIP code area.
Deaths related to COVID-19 are publicly available at the city and county levels only. As of June 15, a total of 962 deaths were associated with the 59,493 COVID-19 infections in the city, a mortality rate of 1.6%. If area COVID-19 cases had the same mortality rate, about 15 of the 962 deaths in the city would have been residents of the 95818 area.