COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout across US Congressional Districts

U.S. President Joe Biden set a goal to vaccinate 200 million Americans within the first 100 days of his presidency. As of September 20, 2021, 212 million Americans have received at least one dose, with 181 million now fully vaccinated, but new challenges have emerged with the rapidly spreading Delta variant, and substantial geographical variations persist in the number of people receiving a vaccine dose. We present a daily snapshot of the geographic variations within the vaccination rollout across the U.S. with interactive dashboards that allow users to track vaccination indicators for US Congressional Districts in both map and tabular format. Representatives, policymakers and constitutents can use this data to understand how vaccine distribution is progressing in their respective Congressional District.

"This research...provides critical insight not previously available into how this pandemic is impacting different congressional districts across the United States.”  – U.S. Representative Nydia M. Velázquez (D-NY)
  

Geographic Visualization

Tabular Visualization

Methodology

Data Sources

The COVID-19 vaccine data displayed on our dashboards came from COVID Act Now, an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded by volunteers in March 2020 to collect and publish COVID statistics. To access their data API for counties, visit their website. Since there was no official base map for the 117th congress, we used the 116th congress base map joined with the newly elected 117th Congress member names. The GIS base map for the 116th Congressional Districts came from ESRI and the spreadsheet with information about the members in the 117th congress was created by Daily Kos.

Crosswalk Methodology (Counties to 116th Congressional Districts)

To create the crosswalk between counties and the 116th Congressional Districts, our team used the Missouri Census Data Center's Geographic Correspondence Engine 2018. Since there were two county changes in 2015, we replaced the FIPS code of two counties; one in Alaska and another in South Dakota, with the following FIPS code: 02270 became 02158, and 46113 became 46102.