South Carolina and Georgia have launched new online panels to share data on COVID-19 vaccines.
Both states have already implemented panels, but the new ones debuting this week are much more extensive.
Here’s a look at what the state has done.
Georgia
The Georgia Department of Public Health is launching a new COVID vaccine panel at https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/3d8eea39f5c1443db1743a4cb8948a9c.
The panel provides what the agency calls “a transparent and detailed picture of the administration of vaccination in Georgia”.
As part of the transition to the new panel, a single reduction will be visible in the number of vaccines administered. This slight decrease is the result of cleaning data and removing duplicate vaccination entries and general quality control.
The panel will be updated daily at 3 pm and now includes:
- Number of vaccine doses that have been administered in Georgia and reported to the Georgia Registry for Transactions and Immunization Services, divided by the first and second doses.
- Number of vaccine doses administered by a Georgia provider per 100,000 residents, divided by the first and second doses.
- Vaccine doses administered by municipality and per day.
- Data on race and ethnicity of vaccine recipients.
- Total number of vaccine doses that were sent to Georgia from the federal government’s allocation to the state.
- The number of Georgian providers who received vaccines from the federal allocation to Georgia.
- Number of vaccine doses sent to providers in Georgia and the percentage of those doses administered.
The agency says it will regularly review and update the panel’s features to ensure the quality, accuracy and transparency of the data.
South Carolina
The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control on Monday launched a new online resource that provides information about the age group, sex, race and ethnicity of people who received the COVID-19 vaccines in South Carolina.
The data are considered provisional, as they are based on the registration of providers about people who are vaccinating in our state. Some people choose to limit the amount of information they tell a provider, such as race and ethnicity.
Updated daily, the demographic data panel is available by clicking on the “COVID-19 vaccination panel” button on the COVID-19 main page.
DHEC asked users to read the document “Understanding the change in data”, which explains what this demographic information means. For example, the information is based on where a person was vaccinated, not where the person lives.
About a fifth of the state’s population is eligible to receive their vaccines. As more vaccines become available and more Southern Carolinians can receive their vaccines, the demographic panel will expand to provide additional information.
Authorities described the new panel during a news conference last week.
“We are excited about this, and very soon,” said Nick Davidson, senior deputy for public health at the state Department of Health and Environmental Control. “We anticipate that it will have a friendly and graphically pleasant version to look at and easy to interpret.”
South Carolina’s immunization information system, SIMON, helps track administered vaccines and also captures demographic data.
DHEC says the panel will include data from the state’s immunization system, along with systems administered by the federal government, VAMS and Tiberius.
The main data points will include age, gender, racial and ethnic origin, along with geographical information.
Mary Beth Kurilo, senior director of health informatics at the American Immunization Registry Association, said that tracking this information helps to pinpoint how the vaccine is being distributed fairly.
Demographic data can help public health officials know who is in a population and how many are immunized. This helps to accurately match a patient to the data. It also helps to find pockets of need in geographic areas and where to deal with health disparities.
“Non-white populations are adversely affected, affected disproportionately by COVID. Race and ethnicity are very, very important, ”said Kurilo. “So we try to track race and ethnicity broadly so that we can be sure not only to understand the impact of the disease, but also the equitable distribution of the vaccine in the field.”
Kurilo speculated that a reason for the delay in a demographic presentation state may be that the reported information was not as complete as desired. But she attributed a more common reason potentially to efforts being devoted to other issues during the pandemic.
“I think a more common reason is just time – that everyone is struggling so quickly to integrate new suppliers, to make sure that the reports are as complete as possible, and many of those people are working 10, 12, 14 hours and not yet was unable to analyze the data and explore it for information in the way we would like. “
Other neighboring states, however, have been releasing demographic data for weeks.
Kurilo said that different states have different policies on information sharing or may have enhanced resources to deal with mining data like this.
“I know we see staffing and workflow problems in many of our jurisdictions, and while all states have an IIS, all IIS are not the same in terms of funding, resources and workforce,” she explained. “And then – there will be variations.”
From the WRDW / WAGT and WMBF reports