Evaluation of COVID-19 Cases and Vaccinations in the State of Georgia, United States: A Spatial Perspective

Abstract

This study evaluates the distribution of COVID-19 cases and mass vaccination campaigns from January 2020 to April 2023. There are over 235,000 COVID-19 cases and over 733,000 vaccinations across the 159 counties in the state of Georgia. Data on COVID-19 was acquired from usafact.org while the vaccination records were obtained from COVID-19 vaccination tracker. The spatial patterns across the counties were analyzed using spatial statistical techniques which include both global and local spatial autocorrelation. The study further evaluates the effect of vaccination and selected socio-economic predictors on COVID-19 cases across the study area. The result of hotspot analysis reveals that the epicenters of COVID-19 are distributed across Cobb, Fulton, Gwinnett, and DeKalb counties. It was also affirmed that the vaccination records followed the same pattern as COVID-19 cases’ epicenters. The result of the spatial error model performed well and accounted for a considerable percentage of the regression with an adjusted R squared of 0.68, Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) 387.682 and Breusch-Pagan of 9.8091. ESDA was employed to select the main explanatory variables. The selected variables include vaccination, population density, percentage of people that do not have health insurance, black race, Hispanic and these variables accounted for 68% of the number of COVID-19 cases in the state of Georgia during the study period. The study concludes that both COVID-19 cases and vaccinated individuals have spatial peculiarities across counties in Georgia state. Lastly, socio-economic variables and vaccination are very important to reduce the vulnerability of individuals to COVID-19 disease.