5 Metro Areas Where Adult Vaccination Rates Look Low

The new COVID-19 vaccines could help the world — including the financial services sector — get back to normal.

One question is how well the U.S. health care system will distribute the vaccine, and another question is how receptive Americans will be to getting new, rapidly developed vaccines.

One clue may to be to look at take-up rates for two well-established vaccines against potentially deadly respiratory illnesses: influenza and pneumococcal pneumonia.

Resources

Links to 2019 BRFSS survey resources are available here.
An article about state-level COVID-19 hospitalization data is available here.

Managers of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey program collect detailed data on the percentage of all BRFSS survey participants who have been vaccinated against the flu in the past 12 months, and the percentage of BRFSS survey participants ages 65 and older who believe they have had a pneumonia vaccination.

For the 118 metropolitan areas in the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia with both influenza and pneumonia data in the 2019 BRFSS spreadsheet, the 2019 flu vaccination rate ranged from 52.5%, in the Daytona Beach-Deltona-Ormond Beach metropolitan statistical area, in Florida, up to 81.8%, in the Madison, Wisconsin, metropolitan area, with a median rate of 65.7%.

For the pneumonia vaccination, the vaccination rate for people ages 65 and older ranged from 56.6%, in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metropolitan area, in Florida, up to 83.5%, in the Manhattan, Kansas, area, with a median rate of 75%.

An adult vaccination index rate — the average of the flu vaccination rate and the pneumonia vaccination rate — ranged from 55.3%, in one metropolitan area, up to 81.5%, in Madison, Wisconsin, with a median of 81.5%.

For a look at the five metropolitan areas with the lowest vaccination index rates — meaning that they had low vaccination rates for both flu and pneumonia — see the slideshow above. (Wiggle your pointer on the first slide to make the control arrows show up.)

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