Assessment of disparities in spatial accessibility to vaccination sites in Florida

ABSTRACT Community-wide vaccinations would be the most effective way to end the COVID-19 pandemic, and accessing vaccination sites would be central in this nexus. Given that the number of COVID-19 vaccines was limited to certain groups of people in the early phases of vaccine distribution, age-based prioritization may have overlooked differences in income levels and the races/ethnicities among older populations. In this vein, using two spatial accessibility measures based on spatially disaggregated hexagons, this paper assesses the disparities in spatial accessibility to vaccination sites with consideration of older populations’ (65+) income levels and their races/ethnicities at the state and the county level. To evaluate the disparities and identify counties with the greatest disparities, a non-parametric two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test at the state level and the statistic at the county level are implemented. The findings of this study indicate that older blacks, older Hispanics, and older populations below the poverty level had better access compared to older whites, older non-Hispanics, and older populations above the poverty level, respectively, at the state level, whereas access disparities varied at counties and geographic locales. We thus conclude that policymakers should take into account older populations’ income levels and races/ethnicities for vaccine prioritization and should pay attention to counties with relatively high disparities in spatial access to vaccines.