Half Of Baysiders Vaccinated, Double Rate Of Southeastern Queens

BAYSIDE, QUEENS — The COVID-19 vaccination rate in Bayside — which climbed over 50 percent this week — is double that of nearby neighborhoods in southeastern Queens, highlighting disparities between neighborhoods and leading to calls to open more jab sites.

Over half of all adults in the 11360, 11361 and 11364 ZIP codes of Bayside — primarily populated by high-earning, white residents, according to census data looking at demographics and economics by ZIP code — are at least partly vaccinated, city data shows.

Bayside’s northernmost ZIP code, 11360, which has the area’s highest percentage of white residents, also has the neighborhood’s highest vaccination rate with 55 percent of residents at least partially vaccinated.

By comparison, the nearby neighborhoods of South Ozone Park, Jamaica, St. Albans, Queens Village, Cambria Heights, Laurelton, and Rosedale — which have vaccination rates as low as 26 percent, with at most 31 percent of residents partly vaccinated — are overwhelmingly populated by people of color. All of the area’s ZIP codes with a vaccination rate under 30 percent are more than 80 percent populated by Black residents.

Laurelton/Rosedale, ZIP code 11413, has a population of more than 90 percent Black residents, and a vaccination rate of only 26 percent — one of the lowest in all of southeastern Queens and the city as a whole.

These neighborhoods also have an overall lower median income, according to census data.

This racial and class disparity in vaccine distribution is not new for the borough — or the city at large, which has struggled to distribute vaccines to many of the Black and Latino neighborhoods hardest-hit by the virus.

When the city first released ZIP Code-level data on vaccine distribution, the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens had the city’s highest vaccination rate, in the nearly entirely white neighborhood of Breezy Point, and some of the lowest rates of vaccination in the peninsula’s eastern, predominantly Black communities, reported The Queens Eagle.

Breezy Point still has the highest percentage of partially and fully vaccinated adults in the entire city, 78 percent and 64 percent respectively, while the eastern neighborhood of Edgemere/Far Rockaway has the city's lowest rate of vaccination — a mere 24 percent of residents have received one dose of the vaccine.

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards told the Queens Eagle that he was "not shocked one bit" adding that it’s “shameful that a community like Far Rockaway, that has one of the highest death rates in the city, does not have a vaccine site in its backyard. The mere fact that we don’t have vaccination sites set up in these pockets is why we see these disparities.”

Although these disparities are still ongoing, there are now a handful of city-run vaccination sites in harder-hit Black and brown Queens neighborhoods, including one at the Beach Channel Educational Campus at Rockaway Beach (which has walk-up appointments for those 75 and up) and another forthcoming site at the Ozone Park Library.

And, as of today, Mayor de Blasio announced that the Queens Mall in the central part of the borough will soon open up as a vaccination site, which Congresswoman Meng, whose been pushing for a site in the western part of the borough, said she was “pleased to learn about” in a press release.

“As I have said, everybody deserves easy access to the vaccine,” she wrote in the release.

As of today, 42 percent of all adults in Queens — over 769,0000 people — are at least partially vaccinated, which is 1 percentage point more than the citywide vaccination rate, city data shows.