SAN JOSE — As he cleaned and repaired pools across South Bay backyards this spring, Mauricio Lopez spoke almost daily with his employees about getting COVID-19 vaccines.
Lopez’s brother and co-owner of Ernie’s Pool and Spa, Rene, died from the virus on Feb. 10th. His death was a “wake-up” call for the other two dozen workers — mostly fellow immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala — to get their shots, Mauricio Lopez said.
“This is serious. We have to do this,” he told them.
But as the weeks dragged on, none of his employees could get an appointment.
Then, one afternoon in April, a client suggested that Lopez reach out to a Bay Area group that was helping essential workers get vaccines. Overnight, more than half of Lopez’s employees, and most of his family, were scheduled for shots.
It was the doing of a small cadre of volunteers who call themselves the “equity fairies.” Formed in response to the persistent inequities in California’s vaccine rollout, the group of five volunteers stays up late at night, helping people to navigate the convoluted sign-up system for getting the shots. In about six weeks, they’ve scheduled nearly 300 appointments in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, primarily for Latino residents working in essential jobs.
“The workers, the supervisors, individual folks and families, they’re desperate to get the vaccine but are dissuaded by this maze of access, and have been outright told by My Turn or other sites, ‘We don’t have any vaccines, or wait your turn’,” said the volunteers’ leader, Rosalie Gutierrez Ledesma, a San Jose native. “Six weeks later, they’re still waiting.”
Ledesma, who is of Mexican descent, started the volunteer work after her own experience trying to get vaccines for her elderly parents. As she scoured websites, filled out questionnaires, and joined a Facebook group called Bay Area Vaccine Hunters, she was frustrated by a system that gave a disproportionate advantage to mostly White, affluent people with the time and technological savvy required to snag the limited appointments available, and the means to travel outside their neighborhoods to get shots.
“These folks would post, ‘Hey, I just got vaccinated at Mexican Heritage Plaza’” in East San Jose, Ledesma said. “I honestly got enraged. They live in my neighborhood, in Almaden. That’s really what catapulted me, like, I’m taking whatever action I can.”
To date, just 24% of vaccinations statewide have gone to the Latino community, which accounts for nearly 40% of California’s population and 56% of COVID-19 cases, according to the California Department of Public Health. About 3.7% have gone to Black residents, who make up about 6% of the population. In Santa Clara County, where the “equity fairies” have focused their efforts, about 14% of vaccinations have gone to Latinos, who make up about 25% of the county population and 50% of coronavirus cases.
“You constantly heard of people getting appointments, right?” said Sam Ulloa, who runs a Latino-focused financial services group and whose employees got their shots through Ledesma. “But there wasn’t any communication. … It was a function of people who already knew how to get those appointments and were exploiting that loophole.”
As her frustration mounted, Ledesma started calling friends, family and neighbors to see who needed help, quickly registering more than 50 people by herself. Through the Facebook group, she also connected with Mukesh Aggarwal, 45, an engineer from Fremont who had coded a program that scans Bay Area vaccine websites and alerts subscribers when new appointments open up via the messenger app Telegram. Up until last week, fresh appointments across the Bay Area were often filled in minutes.
Ledesma told him that by sending a notification to people who were savvy enough to sign up for his app in the first place, the program was cutting out those most in need.
“I could see that underprivileged people have a much harder time than people with computers, cell phones, finding appointments,” Aggarwal said. “And I was really interested in how much time she was putting in.”
They came up with a system. Whenever Ledesma is about to start booking appointments, she texts Aggarwal – “URGENT!!!!!” – and he delays the notification of new slots to his nearly 30,000 subscribers for about 10 minutes. Ledesma “gets that time to book those appointments without competing” with the Telegram subscribers, he said.
By early April, word of Ledesma’s late-night volunteer work had spread among friends of friends, local teachers and Latino business owners who needed help. Three strangers from the Facebook group, including two of its moderators, volunteered to join her.
Armed with shared spreadsheets, a Facebook group chat — and for Ledesma, a steady flow of electronic dance music — the volunteers start working after their families are asleep, and sometimes go as late as 3 a.m. They recently extended their services beyond Latino-owned businesses and workers, sending questionnaires to local community colleges, and are considering expanding their work to other Bay Area counties.
As they pored over a spreadsheet around 10 p.m. one recent evening, the volunteers each tackled several entries at a time, finding appointments to suit a person’s location and schedule. One volunteer messaged someone who had accidentally entered his birthday in a future year; another was troubleshooting a glitch on Santa Clara County’s vaccine website.
San Jose City College student Gerardo Marcelino, 17, had practically given up his vaccine search by the time he heard about Ledesma’s group. As the oldest son at home, Marcelino was informally in charge of securing appointments for the family. He tried searching in Spanish so that his parents could see the process for themselves but found few websites offering information or vaccine sign-ups in Spanish, let alone a step-by-step guide he could give them.
He got stressed out refreshing pages over and over between classes and his nighttime shifts working at Chipotle. Hotlines had long wait times or asked him for information he didn’t know the answer to. But his father contracted the virus last spring, missing a month of work as a gardener, and the family is terrified of what another bout of the virus could do to their financial stability, and the health of Marcelino’s 7-year-old sister, a cancer survivor.
“I felt like I was doing something wrong,” said Marcelino. “It honestly made me feel a bit upset, as well as kind of worried, because I was like, ‘When will we actually be able to get the vaccine?’”
But on Monday, the morning after he filled out Ledesma’s questionnaire, he got his first Pfizer shot.
“It makes me feel really safe, more than I did before, where I’d worry about every little thing,” Marcelino said.
As vaccine supply has increased and more appointments open up in Santa Clara County, the volunteer group’s frenetic scheduling has slowed down. But availability hasn’t made the system easier to understand, the volunteers said: They still regularly hear from workers and families who aren’t even aware that they’re eligible.
Closing the disparities requires tailored outreach and a much more straightforward sign-up process, said Lee Nevo Lamprey, a volunteer who lives in Contra Costa County.
“I one hundred percent think we’re doing work that the government should be doing,” she said.
