Chelsea will join 19 other cities and towns disproportionately affected by COVID-19 for an effort by Gov. Charlie Baker to deploy targeted outreach to the communities and $1 million to support community health centers in priority vaccination of residents.
The announcement came on Tuesday evening from the Department of Public Health (DPH), and Chelsea was identified with other communities like Everett, Revere, Lynn and Lawrence, among others.
This list of 20 is a subset of the cities and towns that met the Massachusetts COVID Advisory Group recommendation to prioritize communities using the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) and COVID-19 case rates since the start of the pandemic. Those communities were then ranked by average daily COVID-19 case rates in each city and town (excluding cases in long-term care and correctional facilities and communities with under 30,000 residents). From this ranked list by case rate, the top 17 cities and towns with the highest percentage of people of color were identified. The list of 20 cities and towns includes three additional communities to capture the top 15 communities with the highest daily COVID case rates.