Editor’s note • This story is only available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers. Thank you for supporting local journalism.
Utah continues to languish at the end of online trackers that rank states for their COVID-19 immunization rates, and it’s not just because the state’s population includes many residents too young to be vaccinated.
In February, a state information error was maintained in the data used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has caused the Utah vaccination rate to be worse than it really is.
Utah officials filed nearly 80,000 vaccination records that had not been “duplicated,” prompting CDC figures to show that Utah had administered 80,000 more doses than it actually had.
CDC officials said they could not remove records from their system, said Tom Hudachko, a spokesman for the Utah Department of Health.
“The solution was for us to stop sending records to CDC until our actual administered dose data had reached what CDC showed,” Hudachko said.
But while Utah’s number of “administered doses” was kept up with CDC data, the state did not report the number of people actually vaccinated during that time, or details about them, such as where they lived or what. doses received.
So now, the number of Utah reports on “total doses administered” closely matches that of the CDC website, usually in a day.
But the CDC “lacks person-level data for the period of time we didn’t report, which means the first dose, total vaccination, demographics, etc., are all lagging behind,” Hudachko said.
Where the error continues to cause gaps
The CDC, for example, said 436,033 Utahns had been fully vaccinated as of Tuesday, more than 100,000 people below the state count of 565,539.
Gov. Spencer Cox has announced the state’s success in vaccinating older Utahns, marking the percentages of vaccinations over the age of 70 and over the age of 65. 65 years of age or older had received at least one dose of vaccine and more than half were completely vaccinated.
Defective county-level data reported by the CDC appears to show large geographic gaps in this drive to vaccinate seniors, for example, a Washington Post analysis based on CDC data recently showed that Grand County had the highest percentage. small number of vaccinated people aged 65 years in the state, with 22.1%.
This surprised Bradon Bradford, director of the Southeast Utah Department of Health. Of Grand County residents age 65 or older, 75 percent have had at least one dose and at least half are fully vaccinated, he told The Salt Lake Tribune. Among the counties served by the department, Grand is the one where vaccination appointments are concentrated as soon as they are available, he said.
In another example, the CDC reports that in Washington County, less than 30% of people over the age of 65 have been completely vaccinated. In fact, 54% of seniors have been completely vaccinated, according to recent data obtained by The Tribune at the county level.
“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 determine the best way to get the CDC site to reflect 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 doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or with the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine. This total accounts for approximately 26% of residents in the state who are over the age of 16 and can get the vaccination.
And more than a million Utahns have had at least one shot of the COVID-19 vaccine, meaning that about 44 percent of eligible state residents have started at least this way, health officials say. state.
But Utah remains on the brink of national online trackers of COVID-19 vaccination rates. Recently, Georgia was only advancing in the Washington Post version, which said that only 30% of Utahns had received at least one dose.
This difference reflects Utah’s other challenge with perceptions about how to vaccinate residents: most online followers, based on CDC data and calculating vaccines per capita using the state’s total population, don’t have account for the large 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 the effectiveness of the doses. By contrast, Utah has administered more than 86% of the doses that have been administered here, according to CDC data, the thirteenth highest rate in the country.
However, in calculations of the percentage of vaccinated Utahns, the February data error is a much larger factor than Utah’s large child population; while CDC ranks Utah in 49th place in the percentage of vaccinated residents, that rank rises to 48 when only the adult population is included.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration could make the decision to administer the vaccine from Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, to younger Americans in a couple of months. They recently reported that their vaccine was extremely effective against the virus when given to teens ages 12 to 15.
Because about 30 percent of Utah’s population is under the age of 18, it is essential to vaccinate children to achieve “herd immunity” that is as important as stopping the spread of COVID-19, according to Utah doctors.
The allocation of vaccine doses per adult population in Utah lags behind most other states because federal officials have used population estimates since 2018, figures that disadvantage fast-growing states.
Other states that have experienced recent growth have raised the same question; Ted Cruz and John Cornyn of Texas sent a letter to the CDC last month asking “to immediately rectify this problem and use current population data in making future COVID-19 vaccine allocations to states and territories.” .
Cox has said federal officials have told him they plan to update the population statistics they use to allocate vaccines to states.