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Utah continues to disappear at the bottom of online trackers that rank states based on their COVID-19 immunization rates – and not just because the state’s population includes many residents who are too young to be vaccinated.
A state reporting error in February remained in the data used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, causing the vaccination rate in Utah to look worse than it actually is.
Utah officials filed about 80,000 unvalued immunization records, prompting CDC figures to show that Utah administered 80,000 more doses than it actually had.
CDC officials said they could not remove the records from their system, said Tom Hudachko, a spokesman for the Utah Department of Health.
“The remedy was for us to stop sending records to the CDC until our actual dose data came to an end with what the CDC showed,” Hudachko said.
But while the number of “administered doses” in Utah was up to date with CDC data, the state did not report the number of actual people vaccinated at the time – or details about them, such as where they lived or what doses they received.
So now, the number of reports in Utah for “total doses administered” closely matches that on the CDC website, usually within a day.
But the CDC “lacks person-level data for the time period that we did not report, which means that the first dose, fully vaccinated, demographics, etc … are all behind us,” Hudachko said.
Where error still causes gaps
The CDC, for example, said 436,033 Utahns were fully vaccinated Tuesday – more than 100,000 people under the state number of 565,539.
Governor Spencer Cox made known the state’s success in vaccinating older Utahs, ticking the percentages of those vaccinated over 70 and over 65. 65 years of age and older received at least one dose of vaccine and more than half were completely vaccinated.
Poor county-level data reported by the CDC would appear to show large geographic gaps in that pressure to vaccinate seniors – for example, a Washington Post analysis based on CDC data recently showed that Grand County had the lowest percentage. of vaccinated persons aged 65 and older in the state, by 22.1%.
This surprised Bradon Bradford, director of the Utah Department of Health. Of Grand County residents over the age of 65, 75 percent have had at least one dose and at least half are completely vaccinated, he told The Salt Lake Tribune. Among the counties served by the department, Grand is one where vaccination schedules are completed as soon as they are available, he said.
In another example, the CDC reports that in Washington County, less than 30% of people aged 65 and over have been completely vaccinated. In fact, 54% of the elderly there have been completely vaccinated, according to recent county-level data obtained by Tribune.
“We are aware of the discrepancy in CDC data and have been working to resolve it for several weeks,” Hudachko said.
“Our data is accurate and we are trying to best determine how the CDC site reflects our data,” he said, “but we have not yet found a solution.”
The challenges for a young state
As of Tuesday, about 600,000 Utahns had been fully vaccinated with either either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or a single Johnson & Johnson vaccine. This total is about 26% of state residents over the age of 16 who are eligible for immunization.
And more than a million Utahns have had at least one COVID-19 vaccine shot – meaning about 44 percent of eligible state residents have started at least this way, state health officials say.
But Utah remains close to the bottom of online national COVID-19 vaccination rates. Recently it was ahead of only Georgia in the Washington Post, which said that only 30% of Utahns received at least one dose.
This difference reflects the other challenge in Utah, with perceptions of how well residents vaccinate – most online viewers, based on CDC data and calculating per capita vaccinations using total state populations, do not consider the high percentage of children in Utah. , most of whom are not eligible for vaccines under current federal drug regulations.
And these per capita vaccination rates do not necessarily show how effective the doses are. By contrast, Utah administered more than 86% of the doses that were administered here, according to CDC data – the thirteenth highest rate in the country.
However, in calculating the percentage of vaccinated Utahns, the February data error is a much larger factor than the large child population in Utah; while the CDC ranks 49th in Utah in the percentage of vaccinated residents, this degree only increases to 48 when it includes only the adult population.
The US Food and Drug Administration could grant OK the administration of the vaccine from Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, to younger Americans in a few months. They recently reported that their vaccine was extremely effective against the virus when given to adolescents between the ages of 12 and 15.
Because about 30 percent of Utah’s population is under the age of 18, vaccinating children is imperative to achieve the importance of “herd immunity” needed to stop the spread of COVID-19, Utah doctors agree.
The allocation of vaccine doses in Utah to the adult population lags behind most other states, as federal officials use 2018 population estimates – figures that disadvantage fast-growing states.
Other states that have seen recent growth have raised the same issue; Texas Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn sent a letter to the CDC last month asking it to “immediately fix this problem and use current population data when making future COVID-19 vaccine allocations to states and territories.”
Cox said federal officials told him they intend to update the population statistics they use to allocate state vaccines.