What's up with Illinois' vaccination-dose numbers lately?
October 25, 2021 8:45 AM   Subscribe

According to the tracker at covidvax.live,[1] Illinois was reporting about 25,000 new doses of vaccine administered per day from late July until October 13, when the number suddenly dropped to about 950 / day. It seems unlikely that Illinoisans collectively decided to stop getting vaccinated on October 13, so where is the drop in numbers coming from?

N.b. I don't know where covidvax.live gets its numbers, or how, so it's possible they're the problem. I don't know where to look for official state vaccine dose statistics.
posted by Spathe Cadet to Grab Bag (5 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Maybe a flawed data pull?

Check out this link.
posted by zerobyproxy at 10:04 AM on October 25, 2021


Best answer: If you scroll down on this page from the Illinois Dept of Public Health, you can see daily administered doses, which seem to remain fairly steady.
posted by notjustthefish at 10:05 AM on October 25, 2021


Best answer: At the bottom of the covidvax page, they link to this CDC page as their source. That seems to be the aggregate number of doses, which matches the current CDC total administered doses (slightly different from IDPH due to how vaccinations at federally-run sites are counted).

However, I don't see on the CDC page anywhere that's reporting the daily totals. It's possible covidvax.live is using the IDPH page. IDPH has had some significant changes to their website structure in the past few weeks. I'm wondering if they are erroneously pulling data for a specific county, rather than the whole state. (My initial thought was Adams, since that's first alphabetically, but it doesn't match.) I don't see a reference to the IDPH data, though, so hard for me to back-tabulate the error source.
posted by quadrilaterals at 10:15 AM on October 25, 2021


Best answer: And, to be clear, the numbers on covidvax.live are wrong - Chicago alone is doing more than 5000 a day.
posted by quadrilaterals at 10:16 AM on October 25, 2021


Best answer: From the bottom of the page you linked, there is a link to the CDC page. That page has a broken link to the Illinois site, but a bit of poking around on their site turns up the correct URL.

That site doesn't show that downward trend, and indeed shows 31,442 doses administered yesterday and a 7-day average of 33711. Definitely looks like something isn't updating properly.

Your site also notes that their data comes from Our World In Data (which in turn cites the same CDC page with the broken link). Poking around, you can see that their raw CSV for Illinois has no data for Oct 10 and Oct 11, then the lower daily rate starts. My first guess is that that someone somewhere in the chain is scraping the Illinois website and it broke when the Illinois site changed the URL, or else Illinois changed the format of some other report/download.
posted by yuwtze at 10:25 AM on October 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


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