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Weekend Vaccination Rates in the United States

There are usually lots of different ways of looking at data. That's part of what makes it fun. In the US, for example, COVID-19 vaccinations peak on weekends for obvious reasons, which makes weekend vaccination rates a useful gauge of what our infrastructure is capable of. So here it is:

As you can see, our weekend vaccination peaks have been steadily rising by about 300,000 each week. In our most recent weekend we vaccinated more than 2 million people each day. If we keep it up—and vaccine supplies hold up—we could reach peak days of 4 million by the middle of March.

POSTSCRIPT: Interestingly, the peak vaccination day for the world as a whole is Wednesday. Does anyone have an explanation for this?

4 thoughts on “Weekend Vaccination Rates in the United States

  1. Ken Rhodes

    An explanation? Sure. Wednesday is traditionally the day doctors take off to play golf. Now their bosses, or their wives, or their conscience, make them work on Wednesday. Since they had no appointments scheduled, they have plenty of time available for giving vaccinations.

  2. asmithumd

    I don't know. However, I don't think the US really peaks on weekends. I think the peak is more like Thurs-Sat, but there is a recording delay. CDC numbers claim to be for 6AM on the day they are reported.

    The US also has a funny weekly distribution cadence. On Tuesday,. CDC gets the available VAX from Mod. and Pfi. for the following week. It then figures out how much each state gets and notifies them. See this web link at CDC for details on next weeks shipments (https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/covid-19-vaccine-initial-allocations-pfizer)

    The shipments apparently arrive on Sunday or Monday and then states work to get them out. Maybe they make more appointments available at the end of the week after they know the vax allotment? Just speculating.

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