by MakeUsWell
RACE in GRAS
GRAS stands for Geography, Race, Autonomy, and Social.
MakeUsWell is saddened by the racial issues in 2021 America. The data reflects this. And the data and the story it supports are persistent, pronounced, and pervasive. This has an oversized impact in the GRAS segmentation and scoring.
We all want America to heal and renew as a multi-ethnic, and multi-racial society sans significant racial issues. But wishful thinking or media platitudes won't get us there. The first step to heal is to understand the data. So MakeUsWell dug deeper.
~13.5% of 330 million people, or 44.2 M are Black Americans.
According to USAFacts, as of March 29, 2.98 M, or ~6.74% of this population segment has received at least one dose of the COVID vaccine. And 1.36M, or 3.07% have been fully vaccinated.
For the entire US population, ~28% have received at least one dose. And ~14% have been fully vaccinated.
So Black Americans are getting far fewer vaccines. And that is a problem that we're mostly aware of—but we’re not doing enough about it.
The problem is actually worse if you take a look at the ratios. We calculated the ratio (% Of Population / % Received a Vaccine) = Population Index.
California has 58 or 1.9% of 3,006 American counties. And California has ~12.12% of the total US population. To pinpoint race-driven vaccination issues we went to the county level. And sometimes to the zip code or neighborhood level in our data analytics.
3/25, Data on Black American Vaccinations
| California County | % Vaccinated | % Of The Population | Population Index |
| San Francisco | 3.1 | 6 | 0.52 |
| San Mateo | 1.1 | 2.8 | 0.39 |
| Alameda | 5.6 | 12.6 | 0.44 |
| Orange | 0.9 | 1.7 | 0.53 |
Consistently in every county the Population index is lower for Black Americans. For example, among known members of the population in Alameda County, this index is 1.72 for multi-race and .8 for white Americans. Alameda has the highest percentage of Black Americans in California.
We tracked this index from January - March, a time-series, not just a snapshot. There was no statistically significant improvement in Alameda County in this index.
Other Observations
Lately criminals have been targeting Americans of Asian origin with hate crimes. These have shown up in the vaccination data. And not only impacted the willingness to take vaccines metrics for Asian Americans. But impacted other races too.
But we had to dig deeper, because Asia is the largest continent in both area and population. And the data and segments look different for India vs. Hong Kong.
And Americans of Asian origin have different vaccine viewpoints depending on where in Asia they come from. Even within the same country, these needs, attitudes, and behaviours differ.
People from Calcutta are almost nothing like people from Bombay. We know because we have colleagues from both places. It's akin to comparing the vaccination viewpoints in Salt Lake City to those in the Upper West Side.
Summation
Race is a complex variable with lots of correlations and casualties. But we successfully incorporated it into the GRAS segmentation and scoring framework.