PA County Fully Vaccinated Percentage: 04/16/2021

[modrepub]

So I got tired of having to try and figure out the PA vaccination rates and tried to do something myself. The principle reason was the PA Health Dept dashboard doesn't post Philadelphia data (https://www.health.pa.gov/topics/disease/coronavirus/Pages/Cases.aspx).

I'm somewhat handy with GIS and R so I just downloaded the PA Heath Dept raw data and tacked on Philadelphia County. This map uses data from approximately 04/16/21. The average % vaccinated county rate is about 23.6% of the eligible population (16+). The 16+ data is 2019 estimated Census data, which is the most recently available data I could pull. The PA Health Dept site appears to use the total county est 2019 population and not the vaccine eligible population. The county colors were chosen such that the 2 lighter blue colors are below the mean across all of PA's counties and the remaining darker blues are above the mean. My choice but I think it's more meaningful if presented this way (caveats to follow).

Data Caveats:

I started to find issues with the reported data when I started poking around in it. I haven't heard these communicated to the general public so I'll try to add a few things I noticed.

It appears county totals may include non-residential vaccination numbers. The state's data includes an "out-of-state" category that is substantial (in the hundreds of thousands). Philadelphia County, which includes a count on its dashboard (https://www.phila.gov/programs/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/data/vaccine/), shows about 1/3 of the fully vaccinated are nonresidents. That's a big portion of the fully vaccinated category. Who knows how other counties are reporting this data (how many out of county residents are included in their totals).

So when you're reading these maps keep in mind there's no way of telling if they truly reflect a true fraction of the folks you will encounter in your public travels. In other words, be wary of % population vaccinated numbers that may not truly represent the fraction of the population that is fully vaccinated. That's because the percentage may be based on estimated total populations values that are either wrong or out of date. County/state totals may also not reflect nonresident vaccination rates which could be substantial. It's probably important to remember folks under 16 are generally not eligible to be vaccinated (if you hang around with that crowd).

Just my thoughts, to be taken with many grains of salt.


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