May 12, 2020

The Urban Health Collaborative has strong ties to Latin America through participation in the Urban Health Network for Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC-Urban Health network). LAC-Urban Health seeks to promote regional and multisectoral collaboration in order to generate evidence on the drivers of urban health and health equity and translate this evidence into policies to improve health across cities in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Network’s main activity, the Salud Urbana en America Latina (SALURBAL) (“Urban Health in Latin America”) is a five-year project that was launched in April 2017.  Project researchers have recently developed developed useful tools for both monitoring the spread of COVID-19 and visualizing current cases in countries, cities, and sub-cities in Latin America.

The first detected case of COVID-19, the infectious disease caused by the most recently discovered coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), in Latin America and the Caribbean was announced on February 26 in Brazil. Since that time, multiple regional and international organizations have developed resources and repositories specific to Latin America and the Caribbean that can support researchers, public health practitioners, and local governments as they track this epidemic and fight the spread of the disease. LAC-Urban Health has compiled COVID-19 resources and repositories with region-wide relevance.

SALURBAL researchers are currently tracking the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin American countries. A new online dashboard developed by the SALURBAL project allows visitors to view changes in the number of confirmed cases and number of COVID-19 deaths in Latin American countries and compare the progress of the pandemic across many different countries.
 
Read more about SALURBAL and their new COVID-19 Dashboard.  
To read more about the UHC’s response to the pandemic, please visit: bit.ly/UHC_COVID19.