Covid-19 diary: Part 44

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
July 11, 2021

I’m going to nitpick a tweet that I dug up yesterday. I’d seen it a few days ago, and I initially intended to use it to make a point in Saturday’s blog post about the continuing Covid-19 disaster. I ended up not including it, but I’d already dug into the data by that time, and I didn’t want the work to go unused.

On July 6, a policy analyst tweeted two maps indicating that the states that have partially vaccinated at least 70 percent of residents have received at least one immunization shot are the same states that voted for Joe Biden by at least 5 percent in the 2020 election. “[T]his is honestly stunning,” the analyst wrote.

I spent some time fact-checking the tweet, which turned out to be somewhat tricky.

One issue is that vaccination maps are updated regularly, meaning that a map that’s available on July 10 could differ significantly from one published on July 6. Another issue is that the maps can illustrate different things. Residents receiving at least one immunization shot and fully vaccinated residents would be the two broadest categories, but you could also examine percent of adults, or percent of residents over the age of 12, who have either received at least one shot or are considered fully immunized. (No Covid-19 shot has yet been approved for those 11 years and younger.)