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Utah continues to languish at the bottom of online trackers that rank states based on their COVID-19 immunization rates – and that’s not just because the state’s population includes many residents who are too young to be vaccinated.
In the data used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a state reporting error remained in February, making Utah’s vaccination coverage look worse than it actually is.
Utah officials filed about 80,000 vaccination records that had not been “ duplicated, ” showing the CDC figures that Utah had administered 80,000 more doses than it actually had.
CDC officials said they could not delete the records from their system, said Tom Hudachko, spokesman for the Utah Department of Health.
“The solution was we had to stop submitting records to CDC until our actual doses of data delivered caught up with what CDC showed,” Hudachko said.
But while Utah’s number of “ doses administered ” overtook the CDC data, the state did not report the number of actual people vaccinated during that time – or the details about them, such as where they lived or what doses they received.
So now the number Utah reports for “ total doses administered ” closely matches that on the CDC’s website, usually within a day.
But the CDC “lacks individual-level data for the period in which we did not report, meaning that the first dose, fully vaccinated, demographics, etc. are all lagging behind,” Hudachko said.
Where the error still causes gaps
For example, the CDC said 436,033 Utahns had been fully vaccinated as of Tuesday – more than 100,000 people under the state’s 565,539 number.
Gov. Spencer Cox has touted the state’s success in vaccinating older Utahns, increasing the percentage of those vaccinated over the age of 70 and over the age of 65. In a press conference with him in late March, Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson noted that 80% of Utahns 65 and older had received at least one dose of the vaccine and more than half had been fully vaccinated.
The lacking county-level data reported by the CDC appears to show large geographic gaps in that push to vaccinate seniors – for example, a Washington Post analysis based on CDC data recently showed that Grand County had the smallest percentage vaccinated people 65 and older. older in the state, at 22.1%.
That surprised Bradon Bradford, director of the Southeast Utah Health Department. Of Grand County residents 65 and older, 75% have had at least one dose, and at least half have been fully vaccinated, he told The Salt Lake Tribune. Among the counties served by the department, Grand is one where vaccination arrangements are made as soon as they become available, he said.
In another example, the CDC reports that in Washington County, less than 30% of people 65 and older are fully vaccinated. In fact, 54% of seniors there are fully vaccinated, according to recent county-level data The Tribune has obtained.
“We are aware of the discrepancy in the CDC data and have been working to resolve it for several weeks,” said Hudachko.
“Our data is accurate and we are trying to determine how the CDC site best represents our data,” he said, “but we haven’t figured out a solution yet.”
The challenges for a young state
On Tuesday, about 600,000 Utahns had been fully vaccinated with either dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or the one-time Johnson & Johnson vaccine. That total is about 26% of the state’s residents who are over the age of 16 and are eligible for immunization.
And more than a million Utahns have had at least one shot of COVID-19 vaccine – meaning about 44% of eligible state residents have at least started down that path, state health officials say.
But Utah remains nearly at the bottom of the COVID-19 vaccination rate online trackers nationwide. It was recently only ahead of Georgia in the Washington Post’s release, which said only 30% of Utahns had received at least one dose.
That difference reflects Utah’s other challenge with perceptions of how well it vaccinates residents – most online trackers, based on CDC data and calculating vaccinations per capita based on the total state population, don’t account for the large percentage of Utah children, most of whom don’t qualify for the vaccines under current federal drug rules.
And that vaccination rate per capita does not necessarily show how efficiently the doses are delivered. In contrast, according to CDC data, Utah administered more than 86% of the doses administered here – the thirteenth highest percentage in the country.
However, in calculations of the percentage of Utahns vaccinated, the February data error is a much greater factor than Utah’s large population of children; While the CDC places Utah 49th in the percentage of vaccinated residents, that rank only rises to 48 when only the adult population is included.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration could give approval to younger Americans with the vaccine from Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, within a few months. They recently reported that their vaccine was extremely effective against the virus when administered to adolescents 12 to 15 years old.
Because about 30% of the Utah population is under the age of 18, vaccinating children is imperative to achieve the all-important “herd immunity” needed to stop the spread of COVID-19, Utah doctors are agree.
Utah’s allocation of vaccine doses per adult population lags behind most other states, as federal officials have used population estimates from 2018 – numbers that are to the detriment of fast-growing states.
Other states that have grown recently have raised the same issue; Texas Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn last month sent a letter to the CDC requesting that “resolve this issue immediately and use current population data in making future allocations of the COVID-19 vaccine to states and territories.”
Cox has said federal officials have told him they plan to update the population statistics they use to assign vaccines to states.