examine if certain racial groups were more vulnerable to the COVID-19 infection, and therefore may be in more urgent need of the vaccine; and to ascertain the reasons for certain outliers in each analysis.
INDIANA VACCINATION RATES BY RACE First, we investigated if there was any disparity for COVID-19 cases and vaccination rates among different races within Indiana by comparing the overall percentage of positive cases and vaccination among each racial group. The COVID-19 data was acquired from https://hub.mph.in.gov/dataset on 6/17/2021. The 2020 Indiana population census data was acquired from https://www.stats.indiana.edu/topic/census.asp. Other races are neglected in this study as most population percentages of each other race is less than 1% of the county total population. Data show that overall, White populations in Indiana had slightly higher infection rates of COVID-19, followed by Black and then Asian 1 populations. On the other hand, Asians were the highest vaccinated among all other racial groups and Black Hoosiers were the least vaccinated (Figure 1).
Figure 1: COVID-19 infections in Indiana by the three dominant racial groups
1
The Census Bureau defines a person of the Asian race as “having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.”
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