It is now months later, and we still have not reached the 70% fully vaxxed rate I would have expected by late June.
Pennsylvania’s daily vaccine update:
— Governor Tom Wolf (@GovernorTomWolf) September 10, 2021
12,392,854 vaccines administered
66.8% of PA’ians 18+ fully vaccinated
83.3% of PA’ians 18+ have received at least one dose
National ranking in first doses administered: 9
In other words, the persistent gap between partial and fully is more of an artifact of our decentralized crappy medical record system in the U.S. In other countries with universal healthcare, if someone went to a pharmacy to get a shot they would be found in the national healthcare database, which would be able to accurately tell which dose it is. Here in the U.S., where the shots are free so you don't even need to report it to your insurance company, the injections people get often won't be recorded accurately.
That means that some portion of that 16.5% who is thought to be Partially Vaccinated but not fully vaccinated probably are fully vaccinated. It also means that some portion of the partially vaccinated number are really double counts of the fully vaccinated numbers, because they represent someone who was fully vaccinated who went to get an unauthorized booster.
But it does mean that the fully vaccinated number is probably an accurate floor of the number of fully vaccinated adults there are in the state. In other words, I think it is accurate to say that at least 66.8% of adult Pennsylvanians are fully vaccinated as of today. We just will never know the real number of fully vaxxed and the partially vaxxed number is probably wrong.
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1-The adult population of PA is 9.63 million. 16.5% (the difference between 83.3% and 66.8% in the Governor's Tweet) of that adult population is 1,59 million people.
