Tracking Inequities in COVID-19 Related Outcomes in Select U.S. Cities
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Report Publish Date: January 2021
This issue brief describes the design and function of the COVID-19 Health Inequities in Cities Dashboard, created by Drexel University’s Urban Health Collaborative.
Primary Takeaways
The COVID-19 Health Inequities in Cities Dashboard creates visualizations that allow users to compare and track inequities among cities, multiple populations in a city, and neighborhoods in a city.
Overview and Objectives
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many structural factors that differ between cities, neighborhoods, and populations led to deep disparities in rates of infection, hospitalization, death, testing, vaccination, and other outcomes. The authors wanted to show how the data dashboard they created could help researchers, policymakers, and health officials track trends and compare inequities within U.S. cities.
Hypothesis or Approach
The authors show examples of visualizations of various trends such as cases, deaths, and hospitalizations over time; testing and positivity rates over time; inequities by race and ethnicity and across neighborhoods in a single city; trends in COVID-19 outcomes across cities; and trends by race and ethnicity in multiple cities.
How This Influences Change
“Comparing inequities across different cities can be especially valuable in understanding drivers, targeting resources, and identifying effective policies,” the authors write.
Research: Go Deeper
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the multiple ways that structural factors such as racism and economic inequality drive health inequities. Inequities in COVID-19 outcomes (testing, incidence, hospitalizations, and mortality) emerged early in the pandemic. A first step in addressing these inequities is to describe and quantify their magnitude in order to create public awareness and identify the factors and policies that may be most effective in eliminating them. Comparing inequities across different cities can be especially valuable in understanding drivers, targeting resources, and identifying effective policies.
The Urban Health Collaborative (UHC) has created the COVID-19 Health Inequities in Cities Dashboard. The dashboard enables visualizations that allow users to compare key COVID-19 outcomes, and specifically inequities in outcomes over time and across cities that are a part of the Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC). Users can compare inequities between groups of individuals (for example by race and ethnicity), by neighborhoods and neighborhood characteristics (for example by neighborhood poverty or segregation), or across cities (for example by comparing cities with more income inequality to those with less income inequality). Each of these types of comparisons, and how they evolve over time, is important to understand the causes of inequities and what we can do to reduce and eliminate them.
Drexel University, 2021
Trends in cases, deaths, and hospitalizations over time Page 2
Research Team
This study and report was conducted and created by the following people.
- S Barber
- U Bilal
- A Diez Roux
- A Furukawa
- C Koh
- J Kolker
- R Li
- E McCulley
- H Rollins
- A Schnake-mahl
- A Sharaf
- V Vaidya
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