You can now get vaccination numbers for U.S. states, counties, and metropolitan areas in an easily downloadable format: the Community Profile Reports published daily by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). These reports are basically the HHS’s one-stop shop for COVID-19 data, including information on cases, deaths, PCR tests, hospitalizations—and now, vaccines. (Read more about the reports here.)
For counties and metro areas, the reports just include numbers and percentages of people who have been fully vaccinated, reported for the overall population and the regions’ seniors (age 65+). For states, the reports include more comprehensive information that matches the data available at the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker.
I visualized the county-level data, including both the overall and 65+ rates. I think this chart demonstrates how valuable it is for the public to have easy access to these data: you can see much more specific patterns reflecting which communities are ahead on vaccination and which still need to catch up.
A COVID Tracking Project friend alerted me to this data news last Monday, April 19. When I dug back into the past couple weeks of Community Profile Reports, however, I found that the HHS started including vaccination data in these reports one week earlier, on April 12. As seems to be common for federal data updates, the new information wasn’t announced in press briefings or other standard lines of communication.
Next, I would love to see the CDC make more granular demographic data available so that we can analyze these patterns with an equity lens. State-level or county-level vaccination rates by race and ethnicity would be huge.
As a reminder, you can find the CDD’s annotations on all major U.S. national and state vaccine data sources here.
More vaccine coverage
- Sources and updates, May 28Sources and updates for the week of May 28 include new Long COVID papers, FDA approval for Paxlovid, bivalent vaccine protection, and more.
- Sources and updates, May 21Sources and updates for the week of May 21 include new funding from the CDC’s forecasting center, keeping masks in healthcare, drug overdoses, and more.
- Sources and updates, May 7Sources and updates for the week of May 7 include tracking Medicaid coverage, vaccine mandates, disparities in COVID-19 deaths, and more.
- Sources and updates, April 23Sources and updates for the week of April 23 include a people’s review of the CDC, COVIDTests.gov usage, vaccine equity, and more.