SACRAMENTO COUNTY, Calif. — Sacramento County is trying its hand at further understanding who exactly is affected the most by the novel coronavirus, releasing for the first time a map of preliminary data broken down by zip code.
The data is from the Sacramento County Public Health Department's latest numbers of confirmed coronavirus cases which accounted for 422 people who tested positive.
The cases are spread throughout the county, but according to an ABC10 review of the data, all but two of Sacramento County's major hospitals are within zip codes with confirmed coronavirus cases in the county. The two hospitals are less than a mile away from a boundary of a zip code with confirmed cases.
Although the proximity to hospitals is a possible commonality, it is too soon to draw any conclusions.
The three zip codes with the highest number of cases share a zipcode with a major hospital.
Kaiser Permanente and UC Davis Medical Center's Rancho Cordova campuses are both in the 95670 zip code, which reported the highest number of cases at 31.
UC Davis Medical Center's main campus in Oak Park is in the 95817 zip code, which reported 25 cases.
Meanwhile, Sutter Medical Plaza Elk Grove is in the 95758 zip code, which reported 23 cases.
If this map does not load, you can view it on the Sacramento county website.
ABC10 checked the mailing addresses of each major hospital in the county. Only Sutter General Hospital and the Sacramento Veteran Administration hospital were within zip codes listed with five or fewer cases.
However, Sutter General Hopsital is one mile from Mercy General Hospital, which is in the 95819 zip code with 11 reported cases. And the Sacramento VA is less than a mile from Kaiser Permanente Rancho Cordova Medical center, which is in the 95670 zip code with 31 reported cases.
The health department says the zip codes are based on patients' addresses, and it is too soon to know what the correlation could be.
Additionally, the data is imperfect. Zip codes with less than five cases, which account for 39% of the provided areas, are not included in the map, and zip codes may not have been determined for all of the cases at the time of mapping.
At first glace, it's striking to see rural areas in Sacramento were not shaded on the map. Whereas the top four zip codes with the highest number of confirmed cases were all high density areas.
ABC10 cross-referenced those with 2010 US Census data and found even some of the county's more dense neighborhoods, like Midtown and South Sacramento, showed a lower amount of cases.
It is important to note that it's possible not all zip codes have been recorded for all cases.
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