Ninety-three percent of qualified residents aged 12 and above for the COVID-19 vaccine in Berkeley have received their complete doses, as announced on Tuesday by Mayor Jesse Arreguin.
The city has started mandating vaccination on indoor establishments like gyms, restaurants and bars on September 10, the second city in the Bay Area to do so, following San Francisco which implemented the said vaccination mandate on August 10.
San Francisco’s city website said 83 percent of its qualified residents have received complete COVID-19 doses.
Berkeley said all of its city workers need to get their full COVID-19 vaccine by the November 15 deadline, and the mandate also applies to all faculty and staff of UC Berkeley.
Last week, California announced that it is going to require vaccination for school children, which is expected to further encourage other states to do the same.
This has followed the order of Gov. Gavin Newsom of the first stay-at-home order in the country when the pandemic first broke out.
Across the U.S., California is included among the highest vaccine rates with 70 percent of eligible residents having been fully vaccinated while 84 percent of residents aged 12 and beyond got at least a single shot.
However, there are some who oppose the vaccination and even the government’s safety guarantee. This has triggered a protest at the state Capitol last month where thousands of people gathered to go against the vaccine requirement, according to a report by KRON4.
Meanwhile, the CDC’s latest data has shown another decrease in California’s transmission level.
The infection rates in the state were labeled as “substantial” by the Centers for Disease and Prevention two weeks ago. It dropped to the “moderate” transmission category, the second-lowest in CDC’s four-tier system, as of Monday, KRON4 reported.
The decrease in the infection rate is attributed to the fall of the seven-day case rate, which went down to 41.3 per 100,000 from 95.3 per 100,000 in two weeks.
