Tweet

Shweta Bansal

4 Jul, 5 tweets, 2 min read

During this holiday weekend and beyond, consider not just your own vaccination status but that of your community and neighboring communities when you make decisions about activities. Vaccination remains highly heterogeneous across the United States. A short thread. (1/

If you're fully vaccinated, you've done your part to protect yourself-- congratulations! As you consider social activities, be sure to consider the rates of vaccination in your community. You can check out your community's vaccination rate at vaccinetracking.us. (2/

If you are a vaccinated individual in a low-vaccination community, you remain at risk for being infected. If you are infected, it's more likely that you'll silently spread infection (including variants) to others (given the vaccines' high efficacy for reducing severity). (3/

You might also be at further risk if the communities around yours have low vacc rates. Mobility between locations is high and their risk is your risk. Below are the current low vacc clusters. Communities within a cluster will more easily support transmission than others. (4/

So, this holiday weekend and during this summer, track your own risk in light of your community's risk. Mask up and social distance to continue protecting yourself and others while having fun safely. Happy 4th, y'all! 🇺🇸🎇

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

More from @bansallab

Shweta Bansal

@bansallab

6 Apr

In the race between vaccination and variants, how will we know that vaccination is winning? Tracking vaccination coverage systematically and accurately is crucial to understanding how the rest of 2021 will go. But currently, this tracking remains patchy & inconsistent. A 🧵.

The CDC reports state-level vaccine coverage (by dose and age group). While this gives an illusion of tracking geographic variation, it obscures communities that are falling behind in vaccination. For more on the importance of fine-scale vacc data: bit.ly/3uqEDuw (2/)

I do know that the CDC recently released a map of county-level vaccination data, but the map only provides qualitative information for 2-dose coverage and the data is not available for download. (3/)

Read 10 tweets

Shweta Bansal

@bansallab

18 Jan

On this MLK Day, we must commit to eliminating health disparities. The 1st step to that is measuring and tracking disparities. Towards that, we've put together a dashboard to track geographic and demographic disparities in US COVID-19 vaccination: vaccinetracking.us (1/)

Denominators matter. So, we aim to track vaccination coverage (as a proportion of population size)for total populations & racial, ethnic + age groups. Tracking vaccination coverage will allow us to track our path to herd immunity, and to quantify inequities in vaccination (2/)

Geographic patterns of vaccination coverage are key to reaching vaccine herd immunity goals. Our goal is to include county-level data for as many states as make that data available (currently only 8). We will update the dashboard as more data becomes available. (3/)

Read 6 tweets

Shweta Bansal

@bansallab

11 May 20

There has been much discussion recently about herd immunity, and the impact of heterogeneity on herd immunity. A thread. (1/)

@nataliexdean

First, I want to reiterate the point made so articulately by @nataliexdean and @CT_Bergstrom: Natural herd immunity is not a goal we should be striving for. Trying to reach the end of this pandemic via that path will lead to mass deaths. (2/)

nytimes.com/2020/05/01/opi…

@mlipsitch

But understanding heterogeneity in COVID-19 transmission is important as it'll help to optimize social distancing and (eventually) vacc strategies. A recent thread by @mlipsitch also discusses how heterogeneity may reduce herd immunity thresholds. (3/)