DHEC fixes inaccurate COVID-19 vaccine data in Jasper Co. Here’s what to know
State health officials have fixed a database issue that once artificially lowered the reported number of Jasper County residents vaccinated against COVID-19.
The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette in mid-March found that a quirk in how South Carolina released its coronavirus vaccine data likely led to an inaccurate inoculation rate in Jasper County.
Vaccine recipients living in Sun City North who had Bluffton mailing addresses appeared to be counted as Beaufort County residents in S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control data, even though they lived in Jasper County.
At one point last month, DHEC reported that only 17 Jasper County residents in Okatie’s 29909 ZIP code had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Hardeeville Mayor Harry Williams called low numbers like that “virtually impossible.” The 29909 ZIP code covers a major chunk of Sun City North, where more than 3,000 people live in Jasper County, Williams said.
The state, meanwhile, had also reported that over 9,500 Beaufort County residents in the multi-county ZIP code were inoculated.
That split didn’t make much sense.
Laura Renwick, a DHEC spokeswoman, in a Monday statement confirmed that some Jasper County residents were previously listed as Beaufort County vaccine recipients in the agency’s online dashboard for coronavirus vaccine data.
DHEC has since fixed the problem, she wrote.
“You should expect to continue to see the Jasper County 29909 counts improve in accuracy,” she wrote.
DHEC’s dashboard for vaccine data is linked to the Statewide Immunization Online Network, or SIMON.
The SIMON database previously fed residency information into the dashboard’s maps based only on vaccine recipients’ cities and ZIP codes.
In other words, if someone lived in the 29909 ZIP code in Jasper County — but had a Bluffton mailing address — when they used that information to schedule a vaccine appointment at Coastal Carolina Hospital, or at another provider, SIMON eventually classified them as a Beaufort County resident, even if they weren’t one, because it read “Bluffton” and “29909” when it designated their residency.
“Starting last week,” Renwick wrote on Monday, “our (geographic information system) team began geocoding all SIMON recipient addresses in order to reassign counties to fix the issue of SIMON assigning zip code/city combinations that are assigned to only one county when they really should be split between counties.
“Historic recipient addresses have been cleaned, and this process is now occurring once a week. The newly assigned county is what we use in the vaccine dashboard.”
DHEC now reports that 1,073 Jasper County residents living in the 29909 ZIP code have received at least one vaccine dose (6,842 residents countywide have received at least one dose, accounting for roughly 29% of Jasper County residents who are 15 or older).
The county also is no longer ranked last in South Carolina for its vaccination rate per 10,000 residents.
(It appears that Beaufort County’s fifth-ranked inoculation rate was not significantly affected by DHEC’s database fix, which was expected.)
Marlboro and Cherokee counties now have lower vaccination rates than Jasper County, which is still near the bottom of the state’s rankings.
