Friday, March 19, 2021

Vaccine confusion

Here's a snapshot of today's display on the California state Vaccines Dashboard:

I'm trying to understand what those percentages mean.

The "(78%)" for doses administered clearly means that California has administered 78% of the doses it has received -- as of today, California has received 17,661,490 doses of vaccine.

But what about the percentages "(13.7%)" and "(14.9%)" for "People partially vaccinated" and "People fully vaccinated"?

It seems like this should be interpreted as "this is the percentage of the overall population of California".

But the overall population of California as of 2020 is 39.4 million. and 13.7% of 39.4 million is 5,398,000 people, a vastly different number than 4,445,354.

If I reverse the computation, by computing ( (100 / 13.7) * 4,445,354) and also ( (100 / 14.9) * 4,825,765), I end up with 32.4 million.

Is the dashboard assuming that the California population is 32,400,000 people?

It's not like fully vaccinating nearly 5 million people is nothing, of course! But I think it's actually only about 11% of the state population, not 13.7 percent.

I must be misunderstanding something basic.

1 comment:

  1. The 32.4M people is probably the number of people aged 16 and older eligible to get the vaccine. There are no vaccines approved yet for kids 15 and under.

    ReplyDelete