Which U.S. City Needs The Covid Vaccine First? HINT: It’s In Michigan

As the Covid-19 pandemic roars across the country leaving record numbers of infection and death in its wake, reports are out that a vaccine is right around the corner.

According the plan laid out, the vaccines would be administered for frontline workers first, followed immediately afterward by those most at risk. The timeline targeted for this first run would be December/January. The general public would then begin getting administered doses in April of 2021.

The hope is to have as many Americans vaccinated as possible by Summers end.

"If most of the population is vaccinated by summer and fall" Fauci said "people can start looking forward to returning to pre-pandemic normalcy. Then you can start talking about this umbrella or blanket of protection on society that would diminish dramatically the risk of a person being exposed or even being infected,” he said. “When so many people are protected, that’s when you get into the real herd immunity."

Based on this concept, it would make sense to start with the U.S. cities that need the most immediate help but how do we determine which U.S. city falls under the most need?

In order to determine the cities that will be in need of the most vaccines in the first wave a company called WalletHub used a methodology that compared 93 large cities selecting the largest cities in the U.S. for which all of the data needed for this analysis was available.

Each metric was calculated by taking into account total U.S. adult population. All cities were graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the highest share of people in need of vaccination.

Wallethub then determined each city’s overall score and used the resulting scores to rank-order a sample. In determining the sample, they only considered the city proper in each case, excluding cities in the surrounding metro area.

The complete list is available here but for now here are the top ten:

1) Detroit

2) Cleveland

3) Birmingham

4) Memphis

5) Louisville

6) Toledo

7) Baton Rouge

8) Buffalo

9) Cincinnati,

10) Newark