Early demand for the COVID-19 vaccine for young children has been startlingly uneven in California, with some areas embracing the shots and others much slower to accept them, a Times data analysis has found.

Those rates are well above the national rate of 12% and the statewide rate of 13%.

Yet uptake of vaccines for kids is lagging across inland California, with rates of 5% in San Bernardino and Kern counties, 6% in Riverside County and 7% in Fresno County.

“In one sense, the higher levels of 5- to 11-year-old vaccination rates is somewhat a surrogate measure for vaccine acceptance at all ages,” said UCLA epidemiologist Dr.

Generally, the areas of California with the slowest rate of administering vaccines — rural Northern California and the Central Valley — are where COVID-19 hospitalization rates are the highest.

“What I worry about most is the Central Valley, in more rural California, where vaccination rates are lower than they are in other parts of the state and are currently having high levels of transmission.”.

The outlook is most optimistic for the San Francisco Bay Area, which has the state’s highest vaccination rate and lowest COVID-19 hospitalization rate.

“In parts of California with higher vaccination rates, I think we can fully expect the winter surge to be more blunted.

County, there will likely be areas with varying rates of COVID-19 vaccinations, said Dr.

And so how it will play out — it might be some average of the two extremes in the Bay Area and the San Joaquin Valley, but probably more [likely], it will be that some communities will really be much more protected, and some will have the potential to have strikingly higher rates of transmission, especially as we get to the holidays,” Bibbins-Domingo said.

The Inland Empire is already suffering from significantly worse COVID-19 hospitalization rates than coastal Southern California counties.

Riverside County has double the COVID-19 hospitalization rate of L.A.

Young children are not only at risk of becoming sick themselves but can pass the virus to older relatives, who — even if they are fully vaccinated — would be at higher risk of suffering severe illness should they get a breakthrough infection.

While some people have noted that children are less likely to suffer severe illness from COVID-19 than adults, it remains crucial that they get vaccinated, epidemiologists say.

Some physicians also worry about possible long-term consequences of COVID in children, such as higher rates of depression or anxiety, difficulty concentrating in school or long-term headaches.

“Getting children vaccinated is an important part of increasing the overall vaccination coverage and limiting transmission,” Rutherford said.

With hospitals full, Central California pleading to send COVID-19 patients to L.A.

County Department of Public Health said Tuesday that white children were three times more likely than Black and Latino children to get vaccinated.

“If we continue to see disparities in pediatric vaccination that put Black and Latinx children at higher risk when transmission increases, we could once again see a situation where these communities suffer the most during a surge,” L.A.

COVID-19 hospitalizations are now three times higher than what the state was experiencing at that point