January 22, 2021: Back to the Pandemic, Vaccinations in Oregon -

The Oregon Health Authority is sharing stats on vaccinations administered, tabulated by various demographic categories. The extremely large fraction of “Other” in Race, and of “Unknown” in Ethnicity suggest (to me) that the folks trying to enter that data into the system (and the system is reportedly also still pretty flaky), or maybe the folks trying to gather that data, have somewhat thrown in the towel. If so, I can't say I blame them.

In any case, the numbers on the site right now, in the Race and Ethnicity categories, are too strange to waste any time on.

On Age, though, they haven’t used “Unknown” or “Other,” but are sticking to regular old numbers. Here’s the chart of what Oregon has reported, on vaccinations by age, as of Friday.

Since the official roll-out in Oregon began with healthcare and home care folks, the fact that the three biggest categories are from ages 30 to 59 makes perfect sense. Ostensibly, the next group to go will be teachers, starting Monday, January 25th. Teachers will likely fall mostly into those same age groups: 30 to 59. And then beginning February 8th (unless the dates change again), we should start to see that 80+ category going up.

So!

This leads to a disparity in that remaining demographic category, Sex. The majority of health care and home care workers are female. The majority of teachers (not college professors, but they aren’t getting included in the “teachers” category anyway) are also female. And the population over 80 is predominantly female.

Men are already getting vaccinated at a slower rate than women are, and it looks like that could continue for some time to come. No doubt once we get down into the layfolk under 70, men will start to catch up. But for now, it’s an interesting side effect of the policy.

Note: I'm not criticizing the policy. I know some folks are, but I'm not one of them. I just thought the stats were revealing.