Latino communities fall behind on COVID-19 booster vaccinations

The number of COVID-19 cases in the Latino community spiked from about 3,000 cases in mid-December to over 21,000 in early January. Although the community is the state's frontrunner in vaccination rates, they have the lowest percentage of people to have received the booster.

Director of Hispanic/Latinx Policy and Strategy at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, Yazmin García Rico, explains that most of the department's efforts are going towards getting the Latinx community boosted. Just over 30 percent have gotten the booster. 

"The best protection against COVID-19 and its variant is to get vaccinated and boosted so that is sort of the focus that we have right now," García Rico explained. "We have seen that the Hispanic population is not getting boosters at the same rate as their white counterparts."

One reason this group might have lower rates, García Rico says, is that many Latinos got vaccinated in the fall and must wait to get the booster. The latest data shows just over 8,000 cases of COVID-19 in the Hispanic community, with 56 percent of Latinos having been vaccinated with at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.