The head of the CDC used that phrase - accurately enough - the other day. It's a terribly depressing turn of events. America is basically giving away vaccines to anyone who wants them. There are now programs to come to your door if you want.
While I'm not a huge fan of the Covid ActNow map, because I think it's rather alarmist in how it determines risk (any risk factor that is "orange" colors the whole area "orange"), but it's a pretty good source for determining trends. A few weeks ago, the country was overwhelmingly "orange" and "yellow" with a few "green" states thrown in.
Now the green states are gone - even Vermont - and we have "red" states emerging. And of course, they are red in more ways than one.
Let's compare two states.
Vermont is "orange" because their infection rate is 1.16. That means every person with Covid is passing it one to 1.16 persons. In other words, it's the R0. Frankly, 1.16 is pretty low. Below 1.00 and the disease is disappearing. Also, the positive test rate is a very low 0.8%. In other words, most people who have Covid are likely being caught in the testing. They are recording slightly less than 2 new cases per 100,000 people, which isn't very many (roughly 12 a day). The other things about Vermont is that almost 75% of Vermonsters have been partially or fully vaccinated. So while there are "breakthrough" cases among the vaccinated, the pool of potential Vermonsters who can even get it is shrinking. The pandemic in Vermont will likely burn itself out, if it hasn't already.
No let's look at Missouri. Missouri is currently "red." Their infection rate/R0 is 1.25. Not horrific, but not great. Their positive test rate is over 11%. That means over 1 in 10 people going in for testing are coming up positive. Given that many people can be asymptomatic and some people are simply less likely to go to the doctor, that suggests there are a lot of people wandering around shedding the virus. What makes Missouri "red" is that they are recording almost 30 new cases per 100,000 people a day. Given the population of Missouri, that's roughly 1,800 cases a day.
So to compare, Missouri is seeing 1800 new cases a day, Vermont is seeing 12. Missouri is much larger than Vermont, but that is still a striking number. The vaccination rate for Missouri? It's 46.2%.
What's more, St. Louis county has been vaccinated/partially vaccinated at roughly 50%. (For some reason there's no vaccination data on the counties that contain Kansas City.) That means rural Missouri is often vaccinated at levels lower than 1 in 5.
Let's look at race in Missouri. African Americans have gotten 9% of the vaccinations, and they are 11% of the population. Whites make up 82% of vaccinations and 82% of the population. In other words, at least in Missouri, this is not a vaccine hesitancy based on race. A quick scan of the table shows that African Americans are getting the vaccine at roughly the rate of their prevalence in the overall population.
However, given the widespread effort by conservative media to undermine confidence in the vaccine, it strikes me that targeting African Americans - especially rural Blacks through their churches - would be a very efficacious way to improve overall vaccination rates in the swath of "red" Red state - Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and Florida. (Florida especially has a disproportionately law rate of vaccination among Blacks.)
Use the importance of Black churches the rural South to get those vaccinations up!
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