“In many ways, the path to community recovery comes through the success of vaccine roll-out and implementation, particularly for historically underserved communities.”
—RAND Corporation
Sentinel Communities Insights—COVID-19: One Year Later Vaccine Roll-Out, Implications for Community Recovery, and Critical Gaps that Remain: Synthesis Report
Report Jul-01-2021 , , and 3-min read
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Report Publish Date: July 2021
This report summarizes COVID-19 response and recovery in nine U.S. “Sentinel Communities” tracked by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on how they rolled out vaccines, advanced economic recovery and equitable housing, and returned students to in-person schooling.
Primary Takeaways
The authors found that:
- Vaccine roll-out was key to community recovery.
- The pandemic was an opportunity to improve mental health services, improve the coordination of health and social services, share more data and resources, and get better at promoting health equity.
- The federal American Rescue Plan was a key source of funding for vaccination, testing, treatment, and equitable health and social services, as well as for economic recovery.
- States and communities refocused their efforts to address housing affordability and availability.
- Schools struggled with how to safely educate students in a pandemic and how to ensure access to the technology needed for remote and hybrid teaching.
- Communities that had begun addressing equity before the pandemic were able to use existing plans and data to help those most in need during the pandemic.
Overview and Objectives
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation began tracking response and recovery in nine communities that were part of its Sentinel Communities Project: Finney County, Kan.; Harris County, Texas; Milwaukee, Wis.; Mobile, Ala.; San Juan County, N.M.; Sanilac County, Mich.; Tacoma, Wash.; Tampa, Fla.; and White Plains, N.Y.
In this report, the authors wanted to paint a picture of the situation in these communities soon after the one-year anniversary of the pandemic.
Hypothesis or Approach
The authors collected information available through mid-May 2021.
How This Influences Change
“Those communities that had, during past disasters, established collaborative structures through data sharing, governance, and financing strategies had a leg-up on pandemic response,” the authors write. “Stakeholders reported that while the pandemic has been devastating in many ways, it has highlighted the interdependencies among economic stability, housing access, and education with public health and mental health in ways that should positively influence health investments in the future.”
Research: Go Deeper
In 2020, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) began tracking the COVID-19 response and recovery efforts of nine communities across the United States with the goal of better understanding how the pandemic, and the local
response to it, is impacting health, well-being, and equity in those communities. Lessons from these nine Sentinel Communities may also be informative to other communities on their journeys to respond to and recover from COVID-19 and to promote health and well-being more broadly.
Previous reports summarized the pandemic’s early impacts (published July 2020), the ways cross-sector collaboration has contributed to ongoing response and recovery efforts (published October 2020), and the impact of the pandemic on children and families (published March 2021). In this report, over a year into the pandemic, we review efforts toward vaccination and community response and recovery across sectors—and the critical gaps that remain.
The past year has shown that recovery from COVID-19 has demanded a response across sectors—health, economic, housing, education, and more—and communities have approached their responses across these sectors in different ways. The American Rescue Plan also brings historic funding to local communities who have significant discretion over how funds are used. While some have used COVID-19 response and recovery resources to reaffirm their approaches to health and equity, other communities continue to encounter long-standing barriers to solving such entrenched community problems.
This report, based on information gathered through mid-May 2021, summarizes the year-long path that nine communities—Finney County, Kan.; Harris County, Texas; Milwaukee, Wis.; Mobile, Ala.; San Juan County, N.M.; Sanilac County, Mich.; Tacoma, Wash.; Tampa, Fla.; and White Plains, N.Y.—traveled with respect to COVID-19 vaccination, health and well-being, economic recovery, equitable housing, and in-person schooling. It also notes the gaps that must still be addressed to achieve truly equitable community recovery.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, March 2021
Research Team
This study and report were conducted and created by the following people.
- RAND Corporation
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