US Vaccination Rates: How's Your County Doing?

How thorough are vaccination rates in the US? And how geographically inhomogeneous?

US vaccination rates: very local, very political

Somebody asked me about an NYT map showing the vaccination rates on a state-by-state basis. It looked like (a) the overall vaccination rates are still quite low, and (b) quite geographically inhomogeneous.

The New York Times publishes data on this, periodically updated. ^[1] I looked at the data as of 2022-Jun-15, and at the county level to get a more fine-grained sense of the geographical distribution, in the snapshot shown here.

Some thoughts:

• The US vaccination numbers are, as expected, abysmally low for 2.5 years into a pandemic, for which multiple vaccines are safe, effect, free, and widely available. We are: 32% fully vaccinated and boosted, 35% fully vaccinated but not boosted, 11% partially vaccinated, and 22% not vaccinated.
• It’s not evenly geographically distributed, and seems to correlate extremely well with Republican/Trumpist politics:
  • Here in the fastness of New England, I’m quite content with our vaccination rates. (Though puzzled why Vermont is not reporting county-level data.)
  • The Eastern seaboard, the Florida coasts (highly populated by Eatern seaboard retirees), and the California coast are all in pretty decent shape.
  • I’m slightly surprised that the Texas border along the Rio Grande is doing so much better than the misery in the rest of Texas.
  • The Four Corners counties in Arizona and New Mexico are spectacular. This is a result of the excellent public health management on the part of the Native American communities there, as we’ve previously noted with great satisfaction.
  • The south and the mountain west, being bastions of conservative nonsense, are as expected working very hard to keep their citizens miserable.

Charles Gaba is still right ^[2], as we’ve said numerous times before. His excellent data, at the latest update as of 2022-Jun-10, still shows the negative effect of Republican politics (which is itself correlated with rural locales, as Republicans have learned minority rule by having enough territory to overcome their minority of total voters):

• The negative slope of the line documents the negative impact of Republican voting patterns on vaccination rates.
• The size of the circles indicates population of a county, so we see that there is a negative effect from rural counties as well.

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Notes & References

1: D Ivory, et al., “See How Vaccinations Are Going in Your County and State”, New York Times, update as of 2022-Jun-15. ↩

2: C Gaba, “Monthly Update: County-Level #COVID19 Vaccination Levels By Partisan Lean”, ACASignups blog, 2022-Jun-10. ↩