Weekly Update: U.S. #COVID19 vaccination levels by COUNTY & Partisan Lean

Methodology reminders:

• I go by county residents who have received the 2nd COVID-19 shot only (or 1st in the case of the J&J vaccine).
  • (data for 3rd/booster shots aren't available at the county level in most states yet)

• I base my percentages on the total population via the 2020 U.S. Census as opposed to adults only or those over 11 years old (or even over 4 years old).

• For most states + DC I use the daily data from the Centers for Disease Control, but there are some where the CDC is either missing county-level data entirely or where the CDC data is less than 90% complete at the county level. Therefore:
  • For Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia, I'm using data from the COVID Act Now Risk & Vaccine Tracker database
    • NOTE: There's several counties in Virginia where I'm using the official state health department dashboard instead this week specifically due to some weirdness in the COVID Act Now data. If these issues continue I may have to switch to the state dashboard for all counties for VA going forward, which would be a royal pain given the inability to export every county at once.

• • For Colorado, Georgia, Minnesota and Texas, I'm using their COVID vaccine dashboards set up by the state health departments.
  • For California, I'm using the CDC data for most counties and the state health dept. dashboard data for the 8 small counties which the CDC isn't allowed to post data for.
  • For Massachusetts, I'm using the CDC data for most counties but am now using the official Massachusetts Health Dept. weekly data report for Barnstable, Dukes & Nantucket counties, which the CDC only has partial data for.

• The 5 major U.S. territories don't vote for President in the general election, preventing me from displaying them in the main graph, but I have them listed down the right side.

• Alaska's 2020 election results are estimated thanks to an updated analysis by RRH Elections (all other states +DC have been using 2020 county-level election data all along).

• BY POPULAR REQUEST, here's an updated Google Spreadsheet with all the relevant data.

With all this in mind, here's what things looked like as of December 25th, 2021:

The most noteworthy thing this week is that the R-squared for this graph has moved over the 0.5 threshold for the first time since I started tracking the county-level vaccination data last spring. As I predicted back in mid-November, the most obvious reason for this is that 5 - 11 year-olds started receiving their 2nd Pfizer shot around Thanksgiving.

The parents who were most likely to have gotten vaccinated themselves earlier this year are pretty clearly the ones most likely to get their children vaccinated, and the parents least likely to get vaccinated are, sadly, also those least likely to vaccinate their children either:

Here's what the data above looks like in bar graph format, broken out in rough deciles (tenths of the total population, or around 33.1 million people apiece). The vaccination rate in the bluest tenth of the nation is running 64% higher than the reddest tenth:

Other things especially worth noting:

• Kalawao County, HI (pop. 82) is still the only one which is 100% vaccinated.

• 9 Counties with over 90% of their populations having received their 2nd shot have ~166,000 residents, including the above plus:
  • Bristol Bay, AK (pop. 844)
  • Apache County, AZ (pop. 66,021)
  • Santa Cruz County, AZ (pop. 47,669)
  • Dukes County, MA (pop. 20,600)
  • Nantucket County, MA (pop. 14,255)
  • Hudspeth County, TX (pop. 2,912)
  • Presidio County, TX (pop. 6,131)
  • Charles City, VA (pop. 6,773) (maybe...see note above re. Virginia data)

• 28 Counties with over 80% of their total populations having received their 2nd shot have ~7.76 million residents, including the above plus:
  • Haines County, AK (pop. 2080)
  • Marin County, CA (pop. 262,321)
  • Mono County, CA (pop. 13,195)
  • San Francisco County, CA (pop. 873,965)
  • Santa Clara County, CA (pop. 1,936,259)
  • Pitkin County, CO (pop. 17,358)
  • San Juan County, CO (pop. 705)
  • Miami-Dade County, FL (pop. 2,701,767)**
  • West Feliciana County, LA (pop. 15,310)
  • Cumberland County, ME (pop. 303,069)
  • Montgomery County, MD (pop. 1,062,061)
  • Big Horn County, MT (pop. 13,124)
  • Rosebud County, MT (pop. 8,329)
  • Los Alamos County, NM (pop. 19,419)
  • Webb County, TX (pop. 267,114)
  • Summit County, UT (pop. 42,357)
  • Fairfax City VA (pop. 24,146) (maybe...see note above re. Virginia data)
  • Menominee County, WI (pop. 4,255)
  • Teton County, WY (pop. 23,331)

**I find Miami-Dade's supposed vaccination rate highly suspicious based on their case rate since June, but whatever.

• 139 Counties with 50.33 million residents have over 70% of their total populations having received their 2nd shot.
  • 66 of these counties have more than 100,000 residents.

• At the opposite end, there's 29 counties which have vaccinated less than 25% of their total populations, with ~284,000 residents:
  • Winston County, AL (pop. 23,540)
  • Crowley County, CO (pop. 5,922)
  • Charlton County, GA (pop. 12,518)
  • Chattahoochee County, GA (pop. 9,565)
  • Long County, GA (pop. 16,168)
  • LaGrange County, IN (pop. 40,446)
  • Cameron County, LA (pop. 5,617)
  • Newton County, MO (pop. 58,648)
  • Garfield County, MT (pop. 1,173)
  • McCone County, MT (pop. 1,729)
  • Powder River County, MT (pop. 1,694)
  • Arthur County, NE (pop. 434)
  • Grant County, NE (pop. 611)
  • Hayes County, NE (pop. 856)
  • Logan County, NE (pop. 716)
  • McPherson County, NE (pop. 399)
  • Sioux County, NE (pop. 1,135)
  • Storey County, NV (pop. 4,104)
  • Billings County, ND (pop. 945)
  • Dunn County, ND (pop. 4,095)
  • Grant County, ND (pop. 2,301)
  • McKenzie County, ND (pop. 14,704)
  • Slope County, ND (pop. 706)
  • Holmes County, OH (pop. 44,223)
  • Harding County, SD (pop. 1,311)
  • McPherson County, SD (pop. 2,411)
  • Moore County, TN (pop. 6,461)
  • Gaines County, TX (pop. 21,598)
  • King County, TX (pop. 265)

• There's 26 counties with more than 100,000 residents which have vaccinated less than 40% of their total populations:
  • Etowah County, AL (pop. 103436)
  • Lee County, AL (pop. 174241)
  • Limestone County, AL (pop. 103570)
  • Morgan County, AL (pop. 123421)
  • Shelby County, AL (pop. 223024)
  • Tuscaloosa County, AL (pop. 227036)
  • Matanuska-Susitna, AK (pop. 107081)
  • Mohave County, AZ (pop. 213267)
  • Bartow County, GA (pop. 108,901)
  • Carroll County, GA (pop. 119,148)
  • Lowndes County, GA (pop. 118,251)
  • Muscogee County, GA (pop. 206,922)
  • Paulding County, GA (pop. 168,661)
  • Richmond County, GA (pop. 206,607)
  • Canyon County, ID (pop. 231,105)
  • Kootenai County, ID (pop. 171,362)
  • Warren County, KY (pop. 134,554)
  • Calcasieu County, LA (pop. 216,785)
  • Livingston County, LA (pop. 142,282)
  • Flathead County, MT (pop. 104,357)
  • Harnett County, NC (pop. 133,568)
  • Anderson County, SC (pop. 203,718)
  • Bradley County, TN (pop. 108,620)
  • Bell County, TX (pop. 370,647)
  • Ector County, TX (pop. 165,171)
  • Berkeley County, WV (pop. 122,076)

• There are 49 counties with more than 1 million residents. Of those, the highest-vaxxed is Montgomery County, MD (82.0% vaxxed) while the lowest-vaxxed is Wayne County, MI (home of Detroit), which has only vaccinated 49.3% of its population.