49
almeree jones outside
her home in dallas’ ideal
neighborhood on feb. 24News plant in the late 1990s and a sec-
ond time from working as a Dallas school
cafeteria worker in 2015. She rises early
to drive two young granddaughters she’s
raising to school when classes are in per-
son. Then Jones, who walks with a limp,
cleans up the whirlwind of hair bows and
breakfast plates left behind in the four-
bedroom house she’s been renting to own
for almost 15 years in Ideal.
Since her husband of 48 years died in
2016, Jones has held together her family
of five adult children and 28 grandchil-
dren and great-grandchildren. And with
a family that size, there’s almost always
something to do, someone to help. A ride
here. A few words of support. For five
family members, a bed in Jones’ home.
But this was a rare morning that deliv-
ered a chance to stay in bed. Then, Jones
heard someone at the door, unusual in the
pandemic. It was Terry Taylor, a neighbor
and friend so solid that she helped Jones
bathe after her stroke and brain surgery.
Taylor had news. An organization around
the corner, the T.R. Hoover Community
Development Corporation, was help-
ing people register for the corona virus
vaccine, right now, in its parking lot.
“So I got up... and put my clothes on
and drove up to the center, and I had one
of the ladies help me do it,” Jones says.
She got her first shot on Feb. 4 and has
scheduled her second.
“It’s so many people of color who
don’t know how to register, where to go
register,” says Jones, who knows she’s
in a better position than many in South
Dallas. “And, when you look at the vac-
cine sites on TV... you see more Cauca-
sian people than you do Black people and
Hispanic people because, I don’t know if
they got a chance to register first or what.”
To understand how distant from
vaccine equity things are here, it is
important to grasp a term that comes up
in Dallas a lot: the COVID vulnerability
index, which was created by the Dallas-
based Parkland Center for Clinical
Innovation (PCCI). The nonprofit
health care analytics company provides
data to improve care and reduce health
disparities. Its CEO, Steve Miff, says that
unless data is applied in a way that drives
equity, “It’s just cool math.”
The vulnerability index predicts
the risk of COVID-19 infection and
death, based on one’s home address. Itget registered for the shot,’ ‘I don’t know
how to maneuver through the computer,’
or more or less have Internet. I under-
stood all of that. I just went in here to the
center and grabbed me a laptop.”It was late January, and Almeree
Jones, 78, was in bed, resting her eyes.
If she had been sleeping, she would have
earned it.
Jones retired from the Dallas MorningNorth Dallas, they are buried, the more
expensive but wind- and ice-storm-
proof option that often comes with in-
stallation of high-speed Internet lines.
In South Dallas, where not even Dallas-
based AT&T offers high-speed Internet
in some sections, rival Spectrum’s ser-
vice is so spotty that on some of Ideal’s
streets, people on one side can get online
while people whose front doors are about
40 ft. away cannot.
That’s the kind of thing that made
Mixon realize the county’s registration
system was driving a new form of dis-
parity. “I was issuing groceries out here,”
Mixon says. “I would have different ones
come up and say, ‘Ms. Mixon, I need to