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As states across the country scale their efforts to administer Covid-19 vaccines, getting information about who has received a vaccine is almost as disheartening as the distribution itself.
With thousands receiving their second dose this week – and many officials debating whether to expand the groups eligible for vaccinations – blind spots are appearing: some states still haven’t released immunization updates and figures released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vary widely. of those released by the state health services.
Additionally, the CDC was slow to display the numbers for the second dose, and a spokesperson for the agency said a percentage of those who received their second injection were initially mixed with the first dose numbers, swelling the number of doses for certain states.
The majority of states have yet to release demographic data on who gets vaccinated, such as race, age, and location – vital information in a pandemic that has disproportionately hit communities of color. Racial data in the medical examiner’s files led to a WBEZ report in Chicago which found that 70% of the city’s coronavirus deaths were black.
During the first months of the pandemic, it was slow, difficult and often incomplete to get data on where the outbreaks were occurring and who was dying from the virus. The lack of information hid hot spots like nursing homes and meat packing plants in those first weeks. At the time, the federal government was unsuccessful in tracking outbreaks in schools and there were delays in tracking positive cases by race. The federal government was slow to release this information and left the effort largely to the states, obscuring the seriousness of the pandemic.
Almost a year later, history is already repeating itself, with the deployment data riddled with gaps, contradictions and delays.
“I’m going to say that no state currently has an ideal information system in terms of real-time public health information that we need,” said Howard Koh, professor at the TH Chan School of Public Health. from Harvard University. .
Koh, formerly assistant secretary for health and social services, made the comments during a press briefing last week on the vaccine rollout.
“Unfortunately, we’ve seen this before with the slow rollout of testing and all the confusion around testing,” Koh said.
The logistics of immunizing an entire country were bound to be difficult. Experts have warned for months that even when the vaccines arrived, it was equally important to establish a framework for distributing the vaccines.
Healthcare workers and nursing home residents were the first to be vaccinated, but states are under increasing pressure to expand distribution instead of leaving vaccines in freezers.
“Each dose of vaccine placed in a warehouse rather than in an arm could mean one more life lost,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Tuesday.
When the vaccine rollout began in mid-December, only a patchwork of states posted updates online, while others relied on briefings. It took two more weeks for the CDC to release state-level data, which revealed the country was far behind its vaccine deployment targets.
Publishing data, often an arid topic left to policymakers and demographers, has become a powerful tool during the pandemic, informing governors, mayors and public health officials when it is safe to resume dining out. inside or reopen schools.
But states like Missouri and Connecticut still haven’t released data updates online. And some of the most populous states are still slow to publish data online. California has yet to release daily immunization data online. The state gave CDC figures showing the first doses at about 2,500 per 100,000 population, behind the national average of 3,600. These figures can be several days old, as states have up to 72 hours to report them. CDC vaccination numbers.
Los Angeles County is reporting data, however, as is New York, which posted vaccination data online before the state did. And states with smaller populations like Idaho and South Dakota were among the first to publish data online.
According to an analysis of immunization data from NBC News, South Dakota has consistently been among the top three states to administer the initial vaccinations since the rollout began, with more than 6,100 injections per capita as of Thursday. West Virginia had the most, with about 6,600 per capita.
Kansas, Illinois and Arkansas just launched their data reports this week, a month after the vaccine launched.
Many state dashboards, like the one for Illinois, show vaccinations by county but not by race or age. States like Tennessee report breed. And while county-level dose data is useful, it lacks the precision that can come from smaller geographic areas like postal codes. A person’s zip code can be used to determine the racial and economic makeup of a neighborhood, without violating their privacy with a full address.
“Most people don’t think about it until times like this,” Koh said. “We need the best possible information from a population perspective – by community, by neighborhood, by race, ethnicity, and we need it in real time. It has to be reliable, and we just don’t have those robust systems right now. “
The three-day deadline for CDC reports creates deviations from information released by state health departments. Even accounting for the delay, some of the immunization totals released by the CDC were still thousands lower.
A spokesperson for the CDC said the first dose numbers were initially disabled because they included certain second dose numbers, which were reportedly corrected in a new data release on Thursday.
The post was the first time the CDC has released the status of second doses in the country, around 10 days after some states began reporting those numbers.
It’s also the first full picture of how far the country is from collective immunity. Even so, the CDC has yet to release data on race, age, or place of residence in the states. Without it, it is difficult to tell whether poor and minority communities and those with limited health care have had equal access to vaccines. The CDC said they would end up expanding the data in the future.
More robust data reports can help spot these inequalities. Florida is one of the few states that publishes location of residence data. A Wall Street Journal report found that out-of-state residents and foreigners with second homes flocked to Florida once the eligibility age was extended.
Many state deployment plans were based on treating vulnerable populations and essential workers, but as some of these plans are adjusted they may not have the time or luxury to obtain data before doses.
Dr Peter Hotez, dean of Baylor College of Medicine specializing in administering vaccines, said that in an ideal scenario, states would have the capacity to collect timely immunization data disaggregated by demographic data on those vaccinated, such as than age and race. But he said he wasn’t sure it was realistic without sacrificing speed of delivery.
“I think it’s really important and useful as long as it’s not a barrier to getting vaccinated,” Hotez said.
“We learned in 2020 that we don’t do well with complicated things,” he said. “We have to make it easy, otherwise it just doesn’t happen.”
After the United States handled the pandemic last year, he said, “we need to do everything we can to make this easy, not difficult and robust.”
Hotez said he generally believed the figures released by states were accurate, although he said delays were always likely.
“I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the figures. It’s just that the numbers are lousy, ”he said. “These are not five-year plans of the Communist Party exaggerating the wheat harvest.”
CORRECTION (Jan. 15, 2021, 5:30 p.m. ET): An earlier version of the graph in this article incorrectly stated that Arizona does not have a Covid-19 vaccine data dashboard. The state has one. The graph has been corrected.
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