Here’s what’s going on with Tarrant County’s COVID-19 vaccine numbers
Last Tuesday, after watching the broadcast of Tarrant County commissioners court, Roxanne Martinez was crestfallen about the discussion of COVID-19 vaccination rates in underserved communities.
Diamond Hill, the Fort Worth neighborhood Martinez has called home for her entire life, had vaccinated just 7% of its population, according to Tarrant County Public Health’s vaccine dashboard.
“I saw the below 7% vaccination rate, and I thought, ‘Maybe we have not done enough,” Martinez said. “Maybe I haven’t done enough.”
Martinez and two of her neighbors have led the way in trying to get as much of Diamond Hill vaccinated as possible. Martinez, who was recently elected to Fort Worth’s school board, has spent the past several months trying to get as many people as possible in her majority Latino neighborhood registered for the vaccine.
But state data shows a different, although still inequitable, picture of vaccine uptake in the Diamond Hill neighborhood, which covers the 76106 ZIP code and is home to 39,218 people.
According to the Texas Department of State Health Services, there are 13,709 residents of the Diamond Hill neighborhood who have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, or about 35% of the ZIP code’s total population.
Although Diamond Hill’s 35% vaccination rate is still much less than the more affluent and white city of Keller, where 58% of residents have received at least one dose, the discrepancy between the county’s 7% figure and the state’s 35% figure has no obvious explanation for community members looking at the different data dashboards.
The county and state’s data dashboards differ so dramatically because of an apparent programming quirk that has resulted from the way the Texas Department of State Health Services processes vaccine information.
Every state has its own immunization information system, which tracks the vaccines people receive in childhood and throughout their lifetime. Texas’ immunization registry, known as ImmTrac2, emerged in the 1990s, when states throughout the country began to build registries as doctors realized they were having trouble tracking their patients’ immunization history as patients moved or changed doctors, said Mary Beth Kurilo, the senior director of health informatics at the American Immunization Registry Association.
As the COVID-19 vaccines became available to the general public, state registries throughout the country were faced with an influx of vaccination data.
“The volume of COVID has been pretty staggering,” Kurilo said.
Every time someone is vaccinated against COVID-19, the vaccine provider is legally required to enter that person’s data into ImmTrac2 within 24 hours of distributing the vaccine, said Paula Perrone of Fort Worth’s Perrone Pharmacy. So as vaccines became more widely available, and thousands of people signed up for the earliest doses, distributors including pharmacies, health departments, and hospitals had a massive additional workload to accompany the distribution of the vaccines: They had to send data to the state for every Texas resident they vaccinated.
The confusion with Tarrant County’s vaccination rate comes from what happens with the information after providers like Perrone enter it into the vaccine registry. When the state’s computer systems sort through the millions of vaccine records it receives, some Tarrant County residents receiving vaccines are mistakenly being moved to other, neighboring counties, said Lara Anton, spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services. Then, that data, which is missing the records of some county residents who have received the vaccine, is sent to Tarrant County Public Health. The county’s health department in turn uses the information to power its vaccine dashboard.
But after the information gets sent to Tarrant County, the state uses a rigorous data sorting system to catch the vaccine records incorrectly moved out of Tarrant County and put them back with the right geographic area, Anton said.
It’s critical for local leaders to use vaccine data at the community level to drive decisions about vaccine outreach, said Susan Hassig, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Diseases. Some variability in numbers is normal, Hassig said, because of differences in how data is defined and because of delays in reporting the data. But ultimately, local vaccine data is what allows communities to determine who still hasn’t had access to the vaccine, and who is still vulnerable to getting sick and dying from COVID-19.
“You need to know, how is [vaccination] going in people 65 and up, how are they doing in people age 40 and below?” Hassig said. “How are you doing with different racial and ethnic groups?”
The communities with low vaccination rates will need specific outreach efforts to help them learn about and get access to the shot, Hassig said. For example, if people between the ages of 21 and 30 years old aren’t getting vaccinated, outreach in local bars like the “shot for a shot” initiatives in New Orleans bars could be an option, Hassig said. But if people in the 65 and older age group have low vaccination rate, “that may not be the best strategy,” Hassig said. “You might want to do outreach with churches.”
This story was originally published July 16, 2021 at 11:31 AM.
