Rural coronavirus vaccination rate grew at half the urban rate last week, reflecting a widening gap

Rural/urban vaccination rates are compared to national average. Rates are adjusted to account for vaccinations not assigned to specific counties. Daily Yonder map; click the image to enlarge it or click here for the interactive version.

The coronavirus vaccination rates in metropolitan counties grew at twice the pace of rural vaccinations last week, May 17-23.

Rural counties saw 394,000 residents become fully vaccinated, bringing the rural rate to 30.2 percent. That’s a 0.9 percentage-point increase from the previous week’s 29.3%, Tim Murphy and Tim Marema report for The Daily Yonder.

Meanwhile, “Metropolitan counties reported an additional 5.3 million completed vaccinations last week, representing a 2.1-percentage-point increase from the week before. The metropolitan rate of completed vaccinations was 37.4% as of May 23,” Murphy and Marema report. “The gap between the national rural and metropolitan vaccinations rates has been growing since the Daily Yonder began analyzing vaccination data five weeks ago. Last week, the metropolitan rate was 7.2 percentage points higher than the rural rate, an increase from 6.1 percentage points two weeks ago.”

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