As countries across the country are switching efforts to administer Covid-19 vaccinations, it is almost as frightening to get information about who got a chance.
While thousands have received their second doses this week – and many officials have considered whether to expand the groups eligible for vaccinations – there are blind spots: some countries have not yet updated vaccinations, and the numbers provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued varies drastically. of those released by state health departments.
What’s more, the CDC was slow to show figures from the second dose, and an agency spokesman said a percentage of those who get their second shots were initially combined with the first dose numbers, which is the number of doses for some states.
The majority of states have not yet released demographic information on who gets shots, such as race, age and location – important information in a pandemic that has affected color communities out of proportion. Racial data in the medical examiner’s records led to a report by WBEZ in Chicago that revealed that 70 percent of the deaths in the city’s coronavirus were black.
In the first months of the pandemic, it was slow, difficult, and often incomplete to obtain data on where outbreaks occur and who dies from the virus. The lack of information hid problems in the early weeks such as old age homes and meat packaging plants. At the time, the federal government did not detect outbreaks at schools, and there were delays in monitoring positive cases by race. The federal government was slow to disclose this information and left the efforts largely to states, which obscured the full seriousness of the pandemic.
Almost a year later, history repeats itself, as the data on the deployment is riddled with gaps, inconsistencies and delays.
“I’m going to say that there is currently no state that has an ideal information system in terms of the real-time public health information we need,” said Howard Koh, a professor at TH Chan School of Public Health at Harvard. university, said. .
Koh, formerly the assistant secretary of health and human services, made the remarks last week during a media conference on vaccine vaccination.
“Unfortunately, we have already seen it with the slow roll out of Tests and all the confusion about the Test,” Koh said.
The logistics of vaccinating an entire country would probably be difficult. Experts have been warning for months that it is just as important to put in place a framework to disperse the shots, even when vaccines arrive.
Healthcare workers and nursing home residents were vaccinated first, but states are coming under increasing pressure to expand distribution instead of putting vaccines in freezers.
“Every dose of vaccine sitting in a warehouse rather than going into an arm could lose one more life,” Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services, said Tuesday.
When vaccination of the vaccine began in mid-December, only a patchwork quilt of states posted updates online, while others relied on news information. It took another two weeks before the CDC released state-level data, which revealed that the country was far behind its target for vaccines.
Data publishing, which is often a dry topic left to policymakers and demographers, became a powerful tool during the pandemic, notifying governors, mayors and public health officials when it was safe to resume restaurant meals. 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 release data online. California has not yet released daily vaccination data. The state gave CDC figures showing the first doses at about 2,500 per 100,000 people, following the national average of 3,600. These figures may now be a few days old because states have up to 72 hours to report the vaccination numbers to the CDC.
Los Angeles County does report data, as does the city of New York, which published the vaccination data online before the state did so. And states with smaller populations like Idaho and South Dakota were among the first to publish data online.
According to an NBC News analysis of vaccination data, South Dakota has consistently been in the top three states in the administration of initial vaccinations since its enactment on Thursday with more than 6,100 shots per capita. West Virginia had the most, with about 6,600 per capita.
Kansas, Illinois and Arkansas just released their data reports this week, one month after the vaccine was vaccinated.
Many state panels, such as Illinois, show vaccinations by country, but not by race or age. States like Tennessee report race. And while provincial dose data is useful, it does not have the accuracy that can come from smaller geographic areas such as zip codes. The postal code of a person can be used to determine the racial and economic composition of a neighborhood, without violating their privacy with a full address.
“Most people do not think about this after such times,” Koh said. ‘We need the best information from a population-based point of view – by community, by neighborhood, by race, by ethnicity, and we need it in real time. It has to be reliable, and we just do not have the robust systems at the moment. ”
The CDC’s three-day reporting creates discrepancies compared to the information provided by state health departments. Even when the delay was taken into account, some of the vaccinations issued by the CDC were still thousands.
A CDC spokesman said the numbers for the first dose were initially unavailable because they contained a number of second doses, which were set in a new version of the data on Thursday.
The release was the first time the CDC had announced the status of second doses in the country, about ten days after some states began reporting the numbers.
It is also the first complete picture of how far the country is away from herd immunity. Nevertheless, the CDC has not yet released data on race, age or home locations in states. Without it, it is difficult to say whether poorer and minority communities and people with limited health care had equal access to vaccines. The CDC has said it will eventually expand the data in the future.
Stronger data reporting can help detect such inequalities. Florida is one of the few states that publishes data on place of residence. A Wall Street Journal report found that foreign residents and foreigners with second homes flocked to Florida once the age cap was extended.
Many state deployment plans were based on tackling vulnerable populations and essential workers, but because some of the plans are being adapted, they may not have the time or luxury to obtain pre-dose data.
Dr Peter Hotez, a dean at Baylor College of Medicine specializing in vaccine delivery, said that under an ideal scenario, states would have the ability to collect timely data on vaccinations, broken down by demographics of who is being vaccinated. , such as age and race. But he said he was not sure it was realistic without sacrificing delivery speed.
“I think it’s very important and useful, as long as it’s not an obstacle to vaccination,” Hotez said.
“We learned in 2020 that things are not going well with complicated things,” he said. “We have to soften it, otherwise it will not be done.”
After the United States dealt with the pandemic last year, he said: “we must do everything possible to make it easy, stupid and robust.”
Hotez said he is generally of the opinion that the numbers issued by states are accurate, although he said some backlogs are still likely.
‘I have no reason to doubt the truth of the numbers. It’s just that the numbers are crooked, “he said. “These are not five-year plans of the Communist Party exaggerating the wheat harvest.”
CORRECTION (January 15, 2021, 17:30 ET): An earlier version of the graph in this article incorrectly stated that Arizona does not have a Covid-19 information dashboard. That state does have one. The graph has been corrected.