Chatham County's reported vaccination rate jumped up a few percentage points June 15 to 43% of county residents having at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
The bump up wasn't because a surge of people got vaccinated here this week. Instead, Georgia's Department of Public Health updated vaccine information Tuesday to include recipients' county of residents in nearly 1 million cases, resulting in higher reported vaccine coverage for many counties, including Chatham.
In Bryan, the vaccination rate is now listed as 40% with at least one dose. In Effingham, it's 30%. The statewide rate is 42%.
The DPH updated county and census tract information for more than 784,000 administered vaccines by matching known vaccine recipient residency information with existing Georgia Department of Driver Services records.
"This more granular data provides additional transparency and accuracy in our county-level reporting and will help guide vaccination efforts in local communities," a DPH press release read.
An additional 463,330 vaccine recipient records in Georgia still lack information about county of residence, the DPH reported.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also reports vaccination rates by county and state. Although some of the data comes from the Georgia DPH, it doesn't match Georgia's numbers. For example, the CDC reports that 32.7% of Chatham County residents are fully vaccinated, compared with the DPH report of 38% fully vaccinate. (The CDC does not report the percentage that have received at least one vaccine.)
DPH spokeswoman Nancy Nydam said there are several reasons for the discrepancies between the state and federal reporting.
The CDC doesn't receive all the data available from the vaccination record and can't pinpoint a recipient's address, she said. The address fields they do receive sometimes are missing county of residence. The CDC has better access to some records than does the state, Nydam said.
"The CDC does have access to federal/military doses given that we don’t have access to," she wrote in an email. "This means that there are instances where the CDC may show more doses than we do because they are pulling from more data sources that can be of a magnitude to change that county’s vaccination coverage (e.g., Chattahoochee County)."
Mary Landers is the environment and health reporter at the Savannah Morning News. Contact her at 912-655-8295. Twitter: @MaryLandersSMN
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This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Updated info shows Chatham vaccine rate better than Georgia's, Effingham trailing
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