Only 22% of the People in This County Are Vaccinated

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 26, 8:30AM EDT

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Only 22% of the People in This County Are Vaccinated — © emholk / E+ via Getty Images

In one county in Mississippi, only 22% of the people have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, a remarkably low number.

The rate of COVID-19 vaccinations in the United States has slowed considerably. Nationwide, 60% of people 18 years or older are vaccinated. However, millions of people have refused. In some states, as many as half of the residents fall into this category. This is particularly true in some southern states. Only 43% of the people 18 years or older have been fully vaccinated in Mississippi. Other states on the low vaccination list include Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee.

The vaccination problem has been exacerbated by the recent very rapid spread of the Delta variant. This variant spreads more than 50% faster than the version of the disease most prevalent in the United States through 2020 and early 2021. Unvaccinated Americans have been put at additional risk because of this much higher infection rate.

It is easy to forget how terrible the spread of COVID-19 has been in America. The headlines more recently have focused on outbreaks in Brazil, India and Indonesia. However, there have been 34,462,236 confirmed cases in the United States, which is 18% of the global total. Fatal cases in America number 616,040, or about 15% of the world’s total.
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When public health officials and the media look at the spread of the disease, they tend to focus on four numbers: cases, deaths, hospitalizations and vaccination rates.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of people fully vaccinated in Smith County, Mississippi, is 21.6%. Among people 65 years old or older, the number is also extremely low at 44.6%.

According to the Census Bureau, Smith County has a population of 15,916. Almost 74% of the population is white, and another 24% is Black. The county is extremely poor. The median household income of $43,105 is about $25,000 below the national figure. The 18.9% poverty rate is close to twice the national figure.

Click here to see which state has the most people in hospitals due to COVID-19.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.