Weekly rural coronavirus vaccinations rose a bit last week; metro rate is 27% higher, causing higher rural death rates

Vaccination rates as of Dec. 16, compared to national average and adjusted to account for vaccinations not assigned to specific counties. Map by The Daily Yonder; click the image to enlarge it or click here for the interactive version.

About 172,000 rural Americans completed their coronavirus vaccinations during the week of Dec. 10-16. That's an increase of about one-third of a percentage point from the week before, one of the slowest growth rates since vaccines became widely available this spring, Tim Murphy and Tim Marema report for The Daily Yonder. Through last week, 21.5 million rural Americans were vaccinated, or 46.8 percent of the rural population.

"In metropolitan counties, the vaccination rate grew by about 0.7 percentage points to 59.5% of the metropolitan population. That’s 27% higher than the rural rate," Murphy and Marema report. "Rural America’s lower vaccination rate is the primary cause of its disproportionately high number of Covid-19 deaths, according to Carrie Henning-Smith, deputy director of the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center. Rural residents are currently dying of Covid-19 at more than twice the rate of metropolitan residents. The gap between rural and urban death rates has gotten worse with each successive wave of the pandemic, the Daily Yonder has reported."