Map display of vaccination progress in Saxony
The mirror
When the corona numbers rose in Germany in March 2020, this mainly happened in the west of the country.
In Saxony, on the other hand, there were relatively few cases.
No wonder that the coronavirus was initially underestimated there.
There was little sign of a pandemic in Saxony, except through strict countermeasures, which many found excessive.
The state was hit all the harder by the second and third waves.
There were significantly more people infected and dead per inhabitant than in the other federal states.
And when it comes to vaccinations, which are considered the best way out of the pandemic, Saxony has so far been the worst nationwide.
The proportion of people who have been completely vaccinated is currently 48 percent; in the whole of Germany it is 54 percent.
Bremen comes out on top with 64 percent.
Saxony has now published vaccination quotas broken down by region.
They show great differences within the state.
In the Erzgebirgskreis and in the district of Bautzen, east of Dresden, the willingness to vaccinate is lowest.
There the quota of completely vaccinated people is only 37 to 38 percent - probably the lowest value nationwide.
The Ore Mountains in particular attracted attention in autumn and winter due to the high number of infections and deaths. The "Free Saxons" are also active there, a party that was observed by the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution and recently classified as right-wing extremist. Corona protests have made the party known. The evangelical group "Christians in the Resistance" is also active in the region, calling anti-corona measures "Satan's plans" and using people who would be enslaved. A study by the TU Dresden also showed that many people in Saxony have massive distrust of politics.
As the map above shows, there are also several districts in Saxony whose vaccination rate is roughly the same as the national average or even significantly higher.
The Vogtlandkreis, for example, is doing almost as well with 63 percent as Bremen, the state with the highest rate.
Chemnitz and the district of Görlitz have quotas of 55 and 56 percent, respectively.
However, the data from Saxony contain some imprecision because vaccinations were assigned to the place where they were given and not to the place of residence of the vaccinated person.
A person from Leipzig, for example, who did not get an appointment at the Leipzig vaccination center in April when the vaccine was still in short supply, but in Grimma, counts as a vaccinated person from the Leipzig district.
Nevertheless, the data should reflect the general trend well.
Regional vaccination data are also available from some other federal states, such as Baden-Württemberg.
The state is currently 55 percent fully vaccinated.
But there are also regional differences in Baden-Württemberg, even if these are not quite as great as in Saxony, as the following map shows.
Pforzheim has the lowest rate at 41 percent - only four percentage points above the number from the Ore Mountains.
Baden-Baden is at the top with 60 percent.
There are also greater regional differences in the data from North Rhine-Westphalia.
The most populous federal state is two percentage points above the national average for the fully vaccinated with 56 percent.
Kleve and Gütersloh have the lowest vaccination quota with 48 percent each. At the top is the district of Olpe with 67 percent - a difference of almost 20 percentage points. However, there are also uncertainties in the data from North Rhine-Westphalia, because they are based on the information on the vaccination location and not on the location of the vaccinated persons.