I go by county residents who have received the 2nd COVID-19 shot only (or 1st in the case of the J&J vaccine).
I base my percentages on the total population via the 2020 U.S. Census including all ages (i.e., it includes kids under 12).
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:
HOWEVER, there's one major outlier over the 65% threshold...Miami-Dade County.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, Miami-Dade has fully vaccinated 68% of their entire population (1.84 million out of 2.72 million residents). I use the slightly lower official 2020 U.S. Census popualtion count for Miami-Dade County (2,701,767), which makes the vaccination rate slightly higher still: 68.24%.
And yet, somehow the 10th-largest county in the United States, which has the 6th highest vaccination rate of any county over 1 million residents, also has the highest new case rate of any county over 1 million residents.
At the time, it was Miami-Dade's massive outlier status in terms of COVID cases since the beginning of July which had tipped me off; it looked like this:
For over a year, I've been tracking the rates of both COVID-19 vaccinations as well as COVID-19 cases & deaths, broken out by county-level partisan lean (namely, what percent of the vote Donald Trump received in 2020).
I've received quite a bit of attention for these analyses, including several national media outlets which have used my work (sometimes with proper attribution, sometimes without) However, there have also been numerous critics who have pointed out that I don't run multivariate analysis when I do this.
Put simply, I look at the correlation between partisan lean and COVID death/vaccination rates or between vaccination rates and COVID death rates...but I don't include other factors like age, income, race/ethnicity, urban-rural status, employment status, health insurance status and so forth.
I've been posting weekly looks at the rate of COVID-19 cases & deaths at the county level since the point at which every U.S. adult could theoretically have received 2 COVID vaccination doses nearly a year ago, broken out by partisan lean (i.e, what percent of the vote Donald Trump received in 2020), as well as by the vaccination rate of each county in the U.S. (nonpartisan).
For a long time I used July 1st, 2021 as my start point, but in December I decided to back this up to May 1st, 2021 instead. Pinning down an exact date for this is a bit tricky since a) different populations were made eligible at different points in 2021, and b) it takes 3-4 weeks after getting your first vaccination dose before you can get the second one, but May 1st is what I've finally settled on. This doesn't really change things much, however.
I go by county residents who have received the 2nd COVID-19 shot only (or 1st in the case of the J&J vaccine).
I base my percentages on the total population via the 2020 U.S. Census including all ages (i.e., it includes kids under 12).
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:
As noted a couple of weeks ago, I've decided to ease up on my obsessive COVID vaccination & death rate tracking. I'm not abandoning it entirely, mind you; I'm just dropping the updates from weekly to monthly.
There's two reasons for this: First, the weekly updates have been monopolizing my time & energy, making me fall behind on a whole mess of other important healthcare policy stuff; after all, this is ACASignups.net not COVIDTracker.net. Secondly, I think it's fair to say that after meticulously tracking the data for nearly two years (in the case of COVID deaths) or one year (in the case of vaccination rates), I've more than made my point.
However, there's one other important factor which I haven't delved into...because I never had access to the data, at least not at the county level: Excess deaths. For this, I've enlisted the assistance of Andrew Stokes, Asst. Professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, to the point that I'm giving him co-author credit for this entry.
It's been another month since my last attempt to estimate a grim but vitally important number: Just how many Trump voters vs. Biden voters have become fatal victims of the GOP/FOX News coordinated anti-vaxx/anti-mask campaign to date, and what sort of impact might this end up having on the midterm elections this November?
As I said at the time, I'm not going to attempt to justify this cynical bean counting anymore...the evidence is now overwhelming that Republican leadership, in coordination with outlets like FOX News and other right-wing outlets, made a conscious decision in spring 2021 to push hard against Americans getting vaccinated against COVID-19 for purely cynical political math reasons.
NOTE: With national COVID deaths continuing to thankfully drop off (the 7-day avg. is down to ~410/day now), I've decided to switch to monthly updates going forward unless COVID deaths start spiking again.
I also recently stopped posting the relative case rates as they've been pretty much stable for the past couple months and the rise of home-based testing, which usually isn't reported to county/state health departments anyway, has made that data somewhat less meaningful.
I've been posting weekly looks at the rate of COVID-19 cases & deaths at the county level since the point at which every U.S. adult could theoretically have received 2 COVID vaccination doses nearly a year ago, broken out by partisan lean (i.e, what percent of the vote Donald Trump received in 2020), as well as by the vaccination rate of each county in the U.S. (nonpartisan).
I go by county residents who have received the 2nd COVID-19 shot only (or 1st in the case of the J&J vaccine).
I base my percentages on the total population via the 2020 U.S. Census including all ages (i.e., it includes kids under 12).
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:
I've been posting weekly looks at the rate of COVID-19 cases & deaths at the county level since the point at which every U.S. adult could theoretically have received 2 COVID vaccination doses nearly a year ago, broken out by partisan lean (i.e, what percent of the vote Donald Trump received in 2020), as well as by the vaccination rate of each county in the U.S. (nonpartisan).
For a long time I used July 1st, 2021 as my start point, but in recent months I decided to back this up to May 1st, 2021 instead. Pinning down an exact date for this is a bit tricky since a) different populations were made eligible at different points in 2021, and b) it takes 3-4 weeks after getting your first vaccination dose before you can get the second one, but May 1st is what I've finally settled on.
