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Utah stays at the bottom of online trackers that rank states according to their COVID-19 vaccination rates, and it’s not just because the state’s residents contain many residents who are too young to be vaccinated.
A state report error in February remained in the data used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, causing Utah’s vaccination rate to look worse than it actually is.
Utah officials submitted about 80,000 vaccination reports that were not ‘duplicated’, which showed the CDC figures that Utah administered 80,000 more doses than it actually was.
CDC officials said they could not remove the records from their system, said Utah Department of Health spokesman Tom Hudachko.
“The solution was that we had to stop submitting records to the CDC until we showed the actual doses administered to the CDC,” Hudachko said.
But while the “doses administered” in Utah catch up with the CDC data, the state does not report the number of actual people vaccinated during that time – or the details, such as where they lived or what doses they received. .
Thus, the number of Utah reports for “total doses administered” corresponds to the number on the CDC’s website, usually within a day.
But the CDC has’ missing data at the personal level for the period in which we did not report, which means that the first dose, fully vaccinated, demographic data, etc. … stay behind, ‘Hudachko said.
Where the error still causes gaps
The CDC, for example, said that as of Tuesday, 436,033 Utahs have been fully vaccinated – more than 100,000 people, down from 565,539.
Government Spencer Cox noted the success of the state in vaccinating older Utahns and vaccinating the percentages of those older than 70 and older than 65. At a news conference with him in late March, Lieutenant Gov. Deidre Henderson noted that 80% of Utahns 65 years and older received at least one dose of the vaccine, and more than half were fully vaccinated.
The deficient data at the provincial level reported by the CDC appears to show large geographic gaps in the pressure to vaccinate the elderly – for example, a Washington Post analysis based on CDC data recently showed that Grand County has the smallest percentage vaccinated at 65 and 65 years of age. older in the state, by 22.1%.
This surprised Bradon Bradford, director of the Department of Health in Southeast Utah. Of Grand County residents 65 and older, 75% had at least one dose, and at least half were fully vaccinated, he told The Salt Lake Tribune. Among the provinces served by the department, Grand is one where vaccinations are called as soon as they are available, he said.
In another example, the CDC reports that less than 30% of people age 65 and older in Washington County are fully vaccinated. In fact, 54% of the elderly there have been fully vaccinated, according to recent provincial-level data obtained by the Tribune.
“We are aware of the CDC data diversity and have been working for several weeks to resolve it,” Hudachko said.
“Our data is accurate and we are trying to determine how best the CDC website is to reflect our data,” he said, “but we have not yet found a solution.”
The challenges for a young state
As of Tuesday, approximately 600,000 Utahns had been fully vaccinated with both doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The total is about 26% of the state’s residents over the age of 16 who are eligible for immunization.
And more than one million Utahns have had at least one shot of COVID-19 vaccine – meaning about 44% of eligible state residents have at least started on the road, state health officials say.
But Utah remains close to the bottom of the nationwide online trailers of COVID-19 vaccination rates. It was just Georgia ahead of the Washington Post recently, which says only 30% of Utahns received at least one dose.
The difference reflects Utah’s other challenge with perceptions about how well it vaccinates residents – most online trackers, based on CDC data and the calculation of per capita vaccinations using the total population, do not take into account Utah’s large percentage children, most of whom are not eligible for the vaccines under current federal drug rules.
And the per capita vaccination figures do not necessarily show how effective doses are administered. In contrast, Utah administered more than 86% of the doses delivered according to CDC data – the thirteenth highest percentage in the country.
However, in calculations of the percentage of Utahs vaccinated, the February data error is a much larger factor than the large population of children in Utah; while the CDC ranks Utah in 49th place in the percentage of residents vaccinated, the rank rises only to 48 if only the adult population is included.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration could give the OK to administer the vaccine from Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, to younger Americans within a few months. They recently reported that their vaccine was extremely effective against the virus when given to adolescents 12 to 15 years old.
Because approximately 30% of Utah’s population is under the age of 18, it is essential to vaccinate children to achieve the all-important “herd immunity” needed to stop the spread of COVID-19.
The allocation of vaccine doses per adult population in Utah lags behind most other states because federal officials will use population estimates from 2018 onwards – figures that are hurting fast-growing states.
Other states that have seen growth recently have raised the same issue; Texas Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn sent a letter to the CDC last month asking “to rectify this problem immediately and to use the current population data when making future allocations of the COVID-19 vaccine to the states and territories” . “
Cox said federal officials told him they plan to update the population statistics they use to allocate vaccines to states.