Mapping US Vaccine Allocation

During the first phase of Operation Warp Speed the federal government distributed Covid-19 vaccines based on the total adult population of each state. Most states then used the CDC’s COVID-19 Vaccines Work Group recommendations in deciding how those vaccines should then be allocated to their citizens. In Phase 1a the CDC advice was that priority should be given to health-care personnel and long-term care facility residents.

Mapping the New Politics of Care has released a new interactive map which helps to visualize how vaccines could have been allocated in counties during Vaccine Allocation Phase 1a. Using the map you can see how many vaccines each county could have been allocated by the state during phase 1a based on different distribution strategies.The map allows you to directly compare how two different distribution strategies would effect the number of vaccines distributed to each county in a state. 

The different strategies include a simple distribution based on the county's adult population, distribution based on the county's number of health-care personnel and long-term care facility residents, and distribution based on the county's Social Vulnerability Index (excluding the race / ethnicity variable). The numbers used by the map are based on the 22,578,375 doses of the vaccine which were distributed in the United States as of January 18th.

A survey conducted by Carnegie Mellon University’s Delphi Lab suggests that more than 25% of Americans do not want to get vaccinated. If 1 in 4 people refuse to be vaccinated then the USA will struggle to ever escape from Covid-19 lock-downs.

While the survey is extremely worrying it is also helpful as it can help the CDC target where they need to target education campaigns. You can explore the results for yourself on an interactive map created from the data by MIT Technology Review. Do your neighbors want to get vaccinated? is a choropleth map which shows the percentage chance that a person in each county in the USA will want to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

Bloomberg's Covid-19 Vaccine Tracker uses data gathered from government websites and public statements to map the progress of the Covid-19 vaccination around the world. The global map shows that countries in the northern hemisphere in general are progressing much faster in rolling out vaccination programs than countries in the southern hemisphere.

The Bloomberg Covid-19 Vaccine Tracker also includes an interactive map which shows the rate that individual states in the USA are administering the Covid-19 vaccination.