The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave a great grade to Pennsylvania last week. The agency’s vaccination map proclaimed that 95% of state residents had received at least one dose of a covid-19 vaccination.
Wow. That’s unbelievable.
That’s the problem. It’s not true. Pennsylvania is not head and shoulders above other states in the race to vaccinate the population, and there are far more than just 500,000 people who need to roll up a sleeve.
Gov. Tom Wolf readily touted the incorrect data at a press conference just hours after it was posted. But surely the governor should have known what the real numbers are, right?
Well, that’s the thing. The real numbers are hard to nail down. Acting Pennsylvania Health Secretary Alison Beam can’t tell you. All that is known is the CDC’s figures aren’t correct.
How does Pennsylvania know that? Because the state gave it new information as far back as July that has not been adjusted. That has led to first doses being overcounted — which is how you end up with a seemingly improbable 95% of Pennsylvanians in that category. It has also led to an undercount of the fully vaccinated.
But those still don’t seem quite right. Accounting for too many first doses by the estimated 500,000 would only move the needle to about
90%, which still seems very high.
And it is high. It’s not all Pennsylvanians. It’s Pennsylvanians eligible to receive the shot, which has also become a moving target in the last few weeks as kids 5-11 have been thrown into the mix. But having a larger pool of people who are mostly unvaccinated should have actually diluted the 95% number. It seems like the actual number should be closer to 76%, but without data everyone agrees is accurate, who is to say?
Pennsylvania doesn’t really get to throw this blame all on the CDC, especially while continuing to insist that people look to the CDC “for ease of use regarding state-to-state comparisons.” The July data was provided by the state after it cleaned up its own information. It makes sense that untying this knot would require figuring out what Pennsylvania’s part in it is because the state’s numbers have frequently been less than accurate and often affected by dumps of data from weeks or months earlier.
The CDC rather hyperbolically called the whole process complex when asked, but it seems in no rush to fix the problem, which means the fact that it continues isn’t all Pennsylvania’s fault either.
The real issue is that people need to be able to trust the data they are being given, and neither the state nor the top medical agency in the country is making that any easier. Maybe the governor could just double-check his stats before he quotes them next time.
— The Tribune-Review (TNS)
