Which Idahoans are getting the COVID-19 vaccine? Nobody really knows
Idaho state health officials have no way to answer some key questions about which Idahoans are getting immunized against COVID-19, as the statewide vaccine rollout enters its seventh week.
A committee advising the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare has meticulously laid out which Idahoans should be eligible for the coronavirus vaccine, and when. The committee has debated and considered how to most fairly parcel out what could be a life-saving injection, but that Idaho can give to only about 21,000 people a week.
But public health officials have no way to track how many people in each rollout group have actually been offered or received a shot. They have no data on how many critical care nurses, kindergarten teachers, people with disabilities or hard-hit demographics — such as Latinos — have been immunized against COVID-19.
“Obviously, we would love to know that,” Dr. Christine Hahn, Idaho’s chief epidemiologist, said during a press briefing Jan. 19.
Hahn noted that, with the first groups eligible for the vaccine, Idaho could deduce that the people getting immunized were in those groups, such as hospital workers and nursing home residents. But after that, it gets fuzzy.
“We’re also reaching out individually to hospitals and asking them to let us know,” Hahn said. “We’ve asked them to give us some information. Of course, they’re all still in the process of vaccinating, so nobody’s giving us sort of a final number yet, but we should have from hospitals and larger facilities those numbers eventually.”
As for everyone else? The state doesn’t know which groups of Idahoans are getting the shot — beyond the ages and general locations.
The state relies on Idaho’s Immunization Reminder Information System (IRIS) to track the number of coronavirus vaccine doses administered, down to the county level. IRIS is a private registry that medical providers and select others, such as child care providers, can access.
But state health officials have said that under state law, the IRIS registry does not include more than basic details, such as a person’s name, date of birth and vaccination record. Idaho Reports and the Idaho Statesman have been unable to find a state law or administrative rule that bars demographic information from being entered into IRIS.
The form that the state gives medical providers to fill out for IRIS records does not include demographic information or occupation.
The state and several Idaho health districts were initially slow to collect and provide race and ethnicity data for COVID-19 in the early months of the pandemic. But once they began publicizing that data, it showed that Latinos — who are just 13% of the state — were contracting COVID-19 at disproportionately higher rates than their white counterparts.
Health officials are still missing race and ethnicity information for significant numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases, even in health districts and counties with large Latino and Hispanic communities.
Roughly 20% of Idahoans who have contracted COVID-19 were Latino, according to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare data updated Jan. 28. But that’s based on only 83,740 cases for which the race or ethnicity was recorded. State health officials don’t have that information for 48% of COVID-19 cases.
This story was originally published January 28, 2021 at 3:04 PM.
