Throughout the 2 1/2 years of the pandemic, there have been numerous accusations of "cooking the books", "hiding deaths" and so forth thrown around at various administrations at the state and federal level. Some of these have proven to be false, others to be accurate, and many to be somewhere in between, depending on your perspective.
Perhaps no state-level administration has been subjected to as many accusations of "hiding data" as that of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. In my own case, the biggest data discrepancy I've written about regarding Florida was the massive vaccination rate outlier status of Miami-Dade County...a discrepancy which, at least in that case, turned out to be more about the legal residence of those vaccinated rather than whether the vaccinations actually took place or not.
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:
States will have an additional year to use American Rescue Plan funds to strengthen the home care workforce and expand access to services
Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), is notifying states that they now have an additional year — through March 31, 2025 — to use funding made available by the American Rescue Plan (ARP) to enhance, expand, and strengthen home- and community-based services (HCBS) for people with Medicaid who need long-term services and supports. This policy update marks the latest action by the Biden-Harris Administration to strengthen the health care workforce, help people receive care in the setting of their choice, and reduce unnecessary reliance on institutional care.
Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) approved California, Florida, Kentucky, and Oregon actions to expand Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) coverage to 12 months postpartum for a total of an additional 126,000 families across their states, annually—supporting 57,000; 52,000; 10,000; and 7,000 parents, respectively.
As you might expect, there's a clear drop-off in new COVID cases per capita as the vaccination rate of the counties goes up. There seems to bea slight drop-off starting around 50% fully vaccinated, followed by a steep drop-off starting around 65% vaxxed.
There's a third drop-off at around 75%, but there's literally only a handful of counties which have achieved that high a vaccination rate so far anyway.
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%.
Yesterday there was a bit of a brouhaha caused when NPR reporters Geoff Brumfiel and Daniel Wood published an in-depth report on the partisan divide when it comes to county-level COVID-19 vaccination and death rates, which was heavily influenced by my own work over the past seven months, including two hour-long interviews in which we went into in-depth discussions of data sources, methodology and conclusions.
The controversial aspect was due to the fact that their published piece originally failed to mention my involvement or assistance in any way whatsoever.
After being called out on this by myself and others, Brumfiel called me to personally apologize and rectify the situation. To his credit, he took full responsibility and specifically noted that his colleague, Daniel Wood, had nothing to do with the oversight. Also to his credit, he arranged for the NPR story to be quickly updated to mention my assistance by name as well as to link to one of my own related COVID data analysis posts:
Back in early September, I began noticing something very odd going on with my county-level scatter-plot graphs which broke out COVID cases/deaths by what percent of the population had been fully vaccinated:
As you might expect, there's a clear drop-off in new COVID cases per capita as the vaccination rate of the counties goes up. There seems to be a slight drop-off starting around 50% fully vaccinated, followed by a steep drop-off starting around 65% vaxxed. There's a third drop-off at around 75%, but there's literally only a handful of counties which have achieved that high a vaccination rate so far anyway.
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%.
Florida state law apparently gives private corporations wide berth as to what sort of information, which is easily available in some other states, they get to hide from the public under the guise of it being a "trade secret."
In the case of health insurance premium rate filing data, that even extends to basic information like "how many customers they have."
For the past couple of months now, most of my COVID scatter-plot charts...whether measuring vaccination rates, new case rates or new death rates...have been based primarily on partisan lean. That is, at both the state and county levels, I've been using the percent of the 2020 Presidential vote won by Donald Trump as the basis for comparison.
I've also looked at vaccination rates by other criteria, of course: Population density, urban vs. rural status, education level and median household income levels...but none of these have had nearly as high a correlation as sheer partisan lean has (although I haven't checked any of those in over a month; perhaps the situation has changed by now).
I've once again relaunched my project from last fall to track Medicaid enrollment (both standard and expansion alike) on a monthly basis for every state dating back to the ACA being signed into law.
For the various enrollment data, I'm using data from Medicaid.gov's Medicaid Enrollment Data Collected Through MBES reports. Unfortunately, they've only published enrollment data through December 2020. In most states I've been able to get more recent enrollment data from state websites and other sources.
Florida is one of 12 states which still hasn't expanded Medicaid eligibility under the ACA (13 if you include Missouri, whose voters expanded the program last year...but which the state legislature refuses to fund).
