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

Methodology reminders:

• I go by FULLY vaccinated residents only (defined as 2 doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine).

• I base my percentages on the total population, 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 Hawaii, Illinois, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia, I'm using data from the COVID Act Now Risk & Vaccine Tracker database.
  • For Colorado, Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina 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.

• County populations are based on official 2020 U.S. Census Bureau data

• 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).

With all this in mind, here's what things looked like as of November 30th, 2021:

It's also important to note that after both the R2 (correlation) and slope formulas have pretty much plateaued over the past two months.

It'll be interesting to see what happens next week now that the FDA has given final approval to the Pfizer vaccine for 5-11 year olds. Remember, the first batch of younger children are getting their 2nd shots right around now, which means they should start showing up in the vaccination data over the next few days:

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 still running over 60% higher than the reddest tenth:

Other things especially worth noting:

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

• Counties with over 90% of their populations fully vaccinated have ~87,000 residents, including the above plus:
  • Dukes County, MA (pop. 20,600)
  • Nantucket County, MA (pop. 14,255)
  • Hudspeth County, TX (pop. 2,912)
  • Bristol Bay, AK (pop. 844)
  • Santa Cruz, AZ (pop. 47,669)

• Counties with over 80% of their total populations fully vaccinated have ~206,000 residents, including the above plus:
  • Presidio County, TX (pop. 6,131)
  • San Juan County, CO (pop. 705)
  • West Feliciana Parish, LA (pop. 15,310)
  • Teton County, WY (pop. 23,331)
  • Apache County, AZ (pop. 66,021)
  • Rosebud County, MT (pop. 8,329)

• 83 Counties with 32.2 million residents have over 70% of their total populations fully vaccinated.

• At the opposite end, there's 13 counties which have vaccinated less than 20% of their total populations, with ~80,000 residents:
  • Slope County, ND (Pop. 706)
  • McPherson County, SD (Pop. 2,411)
  • McCone County, MT (Pop. 1,729)
  • McPherson County, NE (Pop. 399)
  • Holmes County, OH (Pop. 44,223)
  • Harding County, SD (Pop. 1,311)
  • King County, TX (Pop. 265)
  • Grant County, NE (Pop. 611)
  • Arthur County, NE (Pop. 434)
  • Storey County, NV (Pop. 4,104)
  • Garfield County, MT (Pop. 1,173)
  • Billings County, ND (Pop. 945)
  • Gaines County, TX (Pop. 21,598)

• Of counties with more than 100,000 residents, the following counties have vaccinated at least 75% of their total populations:
  • Marin County, CA (pop. 262,321)
  • Sumter County, FL (pop. 129,752)
  • Webb County, TX (pop. 267,114)
  • Miami-Dade County, FL (pop. 2,701,767)**
  • Montgomery County, MD (pop. 1,062,061)
  • Cumberland County, ME (pop. 303,069)
  • San Francisco County, CA (pop. 873,965)
  • Santa Clara County, CA (pop. 1,936,259)
  • Middlesex County, CT (pop. 164,245)
  • Barnstable County, MA (pop. 228,996)
  • San Mateo County, CA (pop. 764,442) (newly added!)

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

• Of counties with more than 100,000 residents, the following counties have vaccinated less than 35% of their total populations:
  • Shelby County, AL (pop. 223,024)
  • Limestone County, AL (pop. 103,570)
  • Lee County, AL (pop. 174,241)
  • Warren County, KY (pop. 134,554)
  • Lowndes County, GA (pop. 118,251)

• There are 49 counties with more than 1 million residents. Of those, the highest-vaxxed is Montgomery County, MD (78.8% vaxxed) while the lowest-vaxxed is Wayne County, MI (home of Detroit), which has only vaccinated 48.4% of its population.