CHICAGO, November 16, 2022 – NORC at the University of Chicago (NORC) has released an interactive mapping tool that will help guide rural communities’ strategies around COVID-19. The publicly available tool provides information on COVID-19 vaccination rates, including newly released data on bivalent boosters, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, and other health and sociodemographic information for communities across the United States. COVID-19 data are collected by state, tribal, local, and territorial public health agencies and other partners and reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In addition, the Rural Health Mapping Tool offers benefits far beyond the pandemic. It integrates several measures of health and prosperity into a single tool, providing a comprehensive picture of the well-being of rural communities. The tool is the first to display a publicly available county-level map of the NORC-developed prosperity index, which provides a single numerical measure designed to reflect the prosperity of a county, based on 16 indicators. With this new tool, users can observe the associations between the prosperity of a county and a range of health and other factors, including the leading causes of death, sociodemographic factors, and physical environment and access to healthcare indicators.

“We know that rural Americans face significantly more health disparities compared with their urban counterparts,” said Dr. Georgina Peacock, Director of CDC’s Immunization Services Division. “The Rural Health Mapping Tool will give communities access to crucial information that will help direct resources and ensure COVID vaccinations are reaching critical populations in rural areas.”


The Rural Health Mapping Tool has several features that are particularly useful for rural communities.

• Users can create a map view that displays only the rural counties in the United States, which will highlight areas of need and resources.
• Every county also has an individual fact sheet, which compares all county-level data to the rest of their state and to the nation.
• All data included in the tool can be downloaded for free and used by local leaders, decision-makers, researchers, and the public.

The tool is being released in observation of National Rural Health Day, which recognizes the importance of the health and well-being of our rural communities.

This initiative is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Rural communities and decision-makers can use these vital data to inform ongoing COVID-19 vaccination efforts, particularly those related to encouraging boosters. The tool also enables free county-level exploration of data across the United States.