COVID-19 vaccine uptake in United States counties: geospatial vaccination patterns and trajectories towards herd immunity
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Abstract
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, safe and effective vaccines were developed and authorized for use in the general population. Studying factors that encourage community acceptance of these vaccines is needed to prevent proliferation of SARS-CoV-2 variants, to safely relax local restrictions, and to return to pre-pandemic living conditions. To our knowledge, United States (US) county-level disparities in vaccination are yet to be investigated. Our data span February - May 2021 across 3138 US counties. We consider percentage of residents with at least one dose of an authorized COVID vaccine as the outcome. Spatio-temporal models were used to determine associations of vaccination rates with time-fixed and time-varying covariates. Spatial variability was modelled via Conditional Auto-regressive models; county trajectories over time were specified using random slopes. Greater vaccination rates occur in counties with older residents, high educational attainment, and high proportion of minority residents. Vaccination rates change with COVID risk metrics, suggesting continued slowing of vaccine uptake due to decreasing incidence and infection rates. County effects reveal strong regional patterns in average vaccination rates and trajectories. Although local herd immunity can be expected in August 2021 for counties with typical uptake rates, these counties are clustered in relatively few areas of the country.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.05.28.21257946: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our article has several important limitations. First, our data are ecological in nature, only available at the level of county. Thus, we cannot use our analysis to infer behavior for any individual resident. Second, while the CDC reports making reasonable efforts to determine county of residence, certain reporting practices, such as reporting through retail pharmacies, federal facilities, or long-term care facilities may result in low …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.05.28.21257946: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our article has several important limitations. First, our data are ecological in nature, only available at the level of county. Thus, we cannot use our analysis to infer behavior for any individual resident. Second, while the CDC reports making reasonable efforts to determine county of residence, certain reporting practices, such as reporting through retail pharmacies, federal facilities, or long-term care facilities may result in low vaccination coverage data. This has potential to add noise to our vaccination maps, especially in areas of high resident mobility or vaccination tourism. Third, although we produce accurate short-term forecasts, unforeseen factors such as discoveries of major adverse reactions, geopolitical events, natural disasters, and logistical breaks in the supply chain cannot be incorporated into our forecast, although these will certainly affect vaccination uptake. In fact, our longer-term forecast should only be considered as a counter-factual scenario if current trends hold.
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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