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I keep hearing Oregon’s vaccination rate per capita is below the national average. I also know several people from Portland who got vaccinated in Washington because it was easier to find a spot there. Did we lose our vaccination edge to Washington’s tally? —Meadow A.
The U.S. vaccination campaign has turned the corner: The bottleneck is no longer too few vaccine doses but too many Americans who show little interest in getting them.
It’s a bit galling to realize that herd immunity may be out of reach because a bunch of people who routinely drive while texting with one hand and drinking a beer with the other think a one-in-a-million chance of vaccine complications is an unacceptable risk, but there it is.
It’s too soon to say where we’ll rank nationally once all the dust has settled. But if you insist on obsessively comparing our stats to those of other jurisdictions, be aware that the numbers aren’t always apples to apples.
For example, the Oregon Health Authority website reported Monday that 48.9% of Multnomah County residents (about 398,000 people) had received at least one dose. That figure sounds underwhelming, but that’s because it’s a percentage of the total population, including all the kids under 16 who aren’t allowed to get the vaccine.
If you want to make the figures sound a little rosier, do as the Biden administration does and report your 398,000 as a percentage of just the vaccine-eligible 16-and-over population. Boom! Just like that we’re at 59%. Nice work, Dr. Fauci!
If you want to be even more optimistic, you can report your number as a percentage of the adult population: 18 and up. Disingenuously booting the 16- and 17-year-olds out of your sample gets you up to a whopping 61%. There’s no scientific reason to do this—it would make just as much sense to put the cutoff at 22—but it happens. When somebody says “75% of adults did X,” you tend to just nod and go along with it.
What doesn’t make much difference to the percentages (to finally answer your question) is the roughly 1% of people who crossed state lines to get vaccinated. It’s true that OHA doesn’t include your border-hopping friends in its total. It does, however, include the 61,400 residents of other states who got their jabs here. In other words, it’s a wash.
Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.