Methodology: COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution Tracker

The Verywell COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution Tracker is a weekly look at the status and progress of COVID-19 vaccine distribution in the United States. In this series, we will report CDC data for:

• Doses distributed to each state
• Doses administered to people in each state
• People with two doses in each state

These data are pulled daily from the CDC COVID Data Tracker. We also use additional data sources to compare the data above to the population in each state:

• State population estimates are from Census data (2019 ACS 5-year estimates)
• Vaccine eligibility qualifications are derived from CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)
• Eligible population sizes are derived from estimates from the Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics, and are calculated by Ariadne Labs’ Vaccine Allocation Planner for COVID-19

Finally, in order to estimate how long it will take until 70% of the population has been vaccinated, we use the change in the number of individuals with 1+ doses of vaccine within the last seven days as the rate of change. We then divide the last week’s increase by the number of people remaining to achieve 70% of the population with at least one vaccine. This gives us the number of weeks remaining to achieve 70% of the population with at least one vaccine. We then add four weeks to this timeline to account for the second course of vaccine necessary, which gives us the total number of weeks remaining.