1/ As of this afternoon, CDC is assigning doses given to people in federal entities TO the states where they reside. This significantly affects the CDC's state totals in a way that makes them harder to compare to state dashboards
2/ This amounts to about 3 million doses. This makes it much harder for us to compare what states report to what CDC reports, which is a big part of our model. (Federal entity numbers are not typically included in state-reported vaccine tallies.)
3/ 🚨Because of that, we are NOT including CDC's update in tonight's report. This artificially depresses the overall number today, which would be higher IF we had an accurate apples-to-apples comparison.
4/ Our general preference is to be conservative when we need further clarity on a number or report. We worried that there was high risk of data errors and over-count if we included the figures tonight, and we're working to figure out how we resolve this as quickly as possible.
5/ Summary: The numbers seem low. They're actually higher, but there's data confusion we need to resolve to show that. We didn't want to break/mis-report something. Bear with us.
❄️SNOW TIME⚡️
So how bad is the impact of the winter storms on vaccinations? It's significant. Twice this week, Texas cut its number of reported vaccinations by 110,000 doses, more than an 80% haircut.
Here's a chart from earlier today showing the hit to the Texas totals -- it's enough to bend the broader U.S. rate curve downward:
🚀And, finally, I wrote yesterday about how more vaccine doses are on the way. Today Pfizer confirmed parts of our model -- they're ramping up deliveries.
We have our usual update coming later tonight, and I'll thread it here. But in the meantime we have a very important methodology update about how we get data + count doses.
Short version: CDC made major changes in how they attribute doses to states, in a way that makes their data non-comparable with state-produced data. Unless something changed, we will be using CDC data for the U.S. going forward. Read the details here:
Upside: It places Defense Dept. vaccinations in the place where people reside. That's important -- the 1918 flu is thought to have started in a military base in Kansas. These federal categories aren't abstract.
You can see how various groups are getting vaccinated vs their populations. Black and Hispanic populations are being vaccinated below their population shares, while some groups are getting vaccinated above.
Because many states don't report the data, on don't have great data completeness, we've integrated state-by-state data quality rankings -- you can explore them here: bloomberg.com/graphics/covid…
New cases in the U.S. continue to fall after the holiday surge. This chart plots total vaccinations vs confirmed cases. More vaccine = more impact on driving down new cases. The leveling off there is (probably mostly) from post-holiday decline.
Here's our table of vaccine deals -- the U.S. now has a TON of vaccine inbound. It's also received more vaccine faster than many other countries with deals for cleared vaccines -- Canada got briefly cut off, more or less, amid a supply interruption