The Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region is one of the world regions hardest hit by the pandemic. This brief the current state of the COVID-19 pandemic using data compiled by the Salud Urbana en América Latina ("Urban Health in Latin America") project (SALURBAL). The brief includes information on the number of cases, deaths, and vaccinations reported, as well as socioeconomic inequities in these outcomes in Latin American cities. Policy approaches and actions that some cities and countries have implemented to improve data quality and reduce inequities are highlighted.

Learn more about the project

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the loss of many lives in Philadelphia. The impact, however, has been disproportionately high among the Latino and Black communities. Over the past year, excess rates of infection, hospitalization and deaths have unfolded among the Latino community. This new data brief uses the framework of differential exposure and vulnerability to illustrate the context in which factors have converged to result in disproportionately large COVID-19 impact among Latinos in Philadelphia.

Learn more about the project

The COVID-19 pandemic has wide inequities in COVID-19 outcomes that have been reported for racial/ethnic minorities, including Hispanics. Hispanics suffer from specific social vulnerabilities that lead to increased risk of infection, and increased prevalence specific risk factors that lead to increased risk of severe illness. This project will leverage data on COVID-19 outcomes by race/ethnicity and neighborhood from the 30 largest cities of the US, corrected for imperfect testing quality and coverage; social inequality measures; and a diverse set of compilations of state-, county- and city-level policies.

Learn more about the project

The Americas Society (a forum dedicated to education, debate, and dialogue in the Americas) and the Council of the Americas (a regional business organization) are implementing an ongoing effort to compile the “the latest, clearest information about how the novel coronavirus is affecting specific Latin American countries and the region as a whole.” They have created a repository of articles and information on this topic.

Visit the Repository

Public Transportation and Active Transportation During the Pandemic is a new brief from Salud Urbana en América Latina (SALURBAL) Project. This brief outlines key recommendations for adapting and supporting public mass transit and active transportation systems to promote safe, healthy, and equitable mobility in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the first brief in SALURBAL’s new mini-series, COVID-19 and Urban Health in Latin America.

View the Brief

After several months of strictly limiting restaurants to delivery, take-out, and curb-side pickup services, cities across the U.S. have begun to allow food establishments to offer on-site dining. Since March, state and local governments have worked with businesses to ensure that precautions are taken for the safety of their residents. Simultaneously, cities are eager to sustain and rebuild local businesses after months of economic distress. With many food establishments forced to shutter or transition to takeout only service, the pandemic has led to widespread job loss in the restaurant industry. Local governments’ handling of this balance between the health of their residents and the strength of their economy has varied significantly across the U.S, depending on state guidance, local regulation, and rates of community transmission of COVID-19.

Read More

On March 10, 2020 the city of Philadelphia reported its first case of coronavirus disease (COVID-19)- an infectious disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-Cov-2. While interpretations of early data framed the COVID-19 pandemic as the “great equalizer,” racial inequities in the city began to emerge in late March, with Blacks being disproportionately impacted. As reported by the City of Philadelphia on May 29, 2020, forty-five percent of people with confirmed infection were known to be Blacks, 15 percent were white, 9 percent were Hispanic, 4 percent were Asian, and 23 percent were of unknown race. Blacks were 1.9-3.5 times more likely to have confirmed infection than whites (Figure 1). Mortality rates were substantially higher among Blacks (9.4 per 10,000 residents) than whites (6.3 per 10,000). While data disaggregated by race/ethnicity are critical, these data alone fail to fully capture the root causes of racial inequities in COVID-19 and mask the complex systems operating to produce them. This not only limits a more complete understanding of the problem, but it also restricts the scope of short- and long-term policy solutions. This brief uses foundational frameworks of racism and descriptive spatial analysis to place data on COVID-19 in Philadelphia in context, illustrating how structural racism and historical and contemporary patterns of residential segregation have converged to create racial inequities during this pandemic.

Read More

WPPN has been hard at work generating infographics and resources for the City of Philadelphia. Feedback from their West Philadelphia partners and community residents prompted work on advocacy for social distancing measures, facts about COVID-19, internet access, food access, and testing sites. The WPPN team have also been calculating how many hospitalizations and lives have been saved in Philadelphia due to the shelter-in-place/ stay-at-home orders enacted March 23rd, producing infographics after 2 weeks, 30 days, and 45 days to share with City agencies and the public. These were calculated by the WPPN team at the Urban Health Collaborative at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health using a model published by The New York Times, and translated into Spanish by Ana Martinez-Donate’s Creating Resilient and Strong Opinion Leaders (CRiSOL) Program.

Social Distancing Graphic
COVID-19 Testing Sites in West Philly
Facts About Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)
COVID19_Infographic_Teens
Internet Connection Infographic
Lives Saved in Philadelphia Infographic

Read More

Using the same model as the WPPN team, the Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC) team at the Urban Health Collaborative replicated these Philadelphia estimates to calculate hospitalizations and lives saved for all 30 largest health jurisdictions in the US (including Philadelp2hia). The results released show that early actions by BCHC members and leaders from America’s largest metropolitan health departments, to get the public to stay home led to an estimated 2.1 million hospitalizations avoided and over 200,000 lives saved.

See all 30 BCHC cities estimates

Closing indoor dining during the first two waves of the pandemic was associated with a 61% decline in new COVID-19 cases over a six-week span, preventing an estimated 142 daily cases per city, compared with cities that reopened indoor dining during that period, according to recently published data from experts at the Dornsife School of Public Health. The team looked at data from March to October 2020 in 11 U.S. cities, including Philadelphia, Atlanta and Dallas. The results were published last month in the journal Epidemiology.

Read More

Pricila Mullachery, PhD, MPH, senior research scientist at the Urban Health Collaborative (UHC) was recently awarded a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Data for Action (HD4A) program, managed by AcademyHealth, to study social determinants of health (SDOH) and COVID-19 in a diverse of cohort patients in the Greater Philadelphia Region. Leslie McClure, PhD, MS, Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Dornsife School of Public Health, and Usama Bilal, MD, PhD, MPH, assistant professor at the UHC, will be co-investigators in this study.

Read More

With state and local policies differing on indoor dining decisions and with little national guidance to prevent the spread of COVID-19, we set out to better understand decisions around re-opening indoor dining and in-person learning. We reviewed indoor dining and in-person elementary school policy decisions in the fall and winter of 2020 across 30 of the largest cities in the US. This blog post summarizes our findings from our article recently published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Read More

The COVID-19 Health Inequities in Cities dashboard was created to compare and track inequities related to the COVID-19 pandemic on a multitude of dimensions, exploring subgroups within cities, neighborhoods within cities, and across cities. The newest addition to the dashboard focuses on describing and comparing inequities by race/ethnicity in COVID-19 outcomes over the course of the pandemic.

Read More

The dashboard has recently been updated to include two new features that leverage data on COVID-19 vaccination outcomes by age. The first new feature shows city-specific inequities by age group and can be found under the City Report: Vaccination Inequities section of the dashboard. The “inequities by age group” allows users to compare the COVID-19 vaccination outcomes listed below by meaningful age groups.

Read More

The COVID-19 Health Inequities in Cities dashboard has undergone several updates including new blog posts, a public access data repository, and a new section focused on COVID-19 vaccination inequities. This new section leverages vaccination data from 29 large US cities, allowing users to characterize, track, and compare COVID-19 vaccination inequities on multiple levels: across individuals within cities, across neighborhoods within cities, and across cities.

Read More

The COVID-19 Inequities Dashboard was recently updated to include displays, comparisons, and geographic inequities in COVID-19 vaccinations and neighborhood availability and access to COVID-19 testing through spatial analysis. With vaccination becoming more widespread, tracking outcomes and inequities in COVID-19 vaccination rates can be used to determine gaps in vaccine coverage. In a new “Vaccination” section added to in the Inequities section of the dashboard, users can track, describe, and compare inequities in COVID-19 vaccination on multiple levels in US cities.

Read More

The COVID-19 Inequities Dashboard launched on January 21, 2021. Throughout this year the team has regularly maintained and updated city level trend data for the 30 BCHC cities, neighborhood-level data for 14 cities, race/ethnicity data for 17 cities, and age-adjusted data for 13 cities. COVID-19 case surveillance data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is also recent in the dashboard as of March 2021. In addition to new data and data sources, updates to dashboard features have also been incorporated. The dashboard now displays plots to visualize inequities in COVID-19 outcomes, both by race/ethnicity and by neighborhood.

Read More

Usama Bilal, MD, PhD, MPH, assistant professor at the Urban Health Collaborative (UHC), was recently tasked, along with Javier Padilla, MD, MPH, MSc, and former postdoctoral fellow at the UHC Pedro Gullón, MD, PhD, with creating a report on the evidence about indoor dining and COVID-19 transmission for the health commissioner of the Asturias region of Spain. After the region closed indoor dining, the restaurant industry sued the regional government in Asturias in hopes of loosening restrictions. The team’s report sent to the health commissioner, using data from the United States, South Korea, China, and the UK was instrumental in the court’s decision to keep restrictions in place to limit transmission from indoor dining.

Read More

Urban Health Collaborative (UHC) Director and Dornsife Dean Ana Diez Roux, MD, PhD, MPH and Assistant Professor Usama Bilal, MD, PhD, MPH, have been awarded a one year, $250,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This study will focus on building on the Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC) COVID-19 Health Inequities in Cities Dashboard to characterize the availability and inequalities of COVID-19 testing, characterize policies that cities have implemented to reduce these inequities, and evaluate the effects of these policies.

Read More

Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and the Urban Health Collaborative (UHC) at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health are partnering with multi-family property owners to develop data indicators demonstrating the connections between COVID-19 and tenant, building owner, and building needs. These include current and projected needs of tenants such as basic daily needs, behavioral health needs, physical health status, job loss due to COVID-19, and the corresponding impact on affordable rental properties.

Read More

Alina S. Schnake-Mahl, ScD, MPH, postdoctoral research fellow at the UHC, published Places and the Pandemic – Barriers and Opportunities to Address Geographic Inequity. The beginning of the pandemic saw urban areas as hotspots for COVID-19, however, many rural and suburban areas across the country have experienced similar infection and mortality rates. COVID-19 does not respect geographic boundaries, but racial and socioeconomic inequalities that existed long before the novel coronavirus have maintained their persistent patterns.

Read More

Infographics produced by the Urban Health Collaborative (UHC) in partnership with the Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC) have made waves across the country as public officials reinforce the value of social distancing in their jurisdictions. The infographics highlight estimates of lives saved and hospitalizations avoided due to stay-at-home orders in each of the BCHC member cities, emphasizing to residents of the 30 largest U.S. metropolitan areas that their efforts have made an impact. The statistics were referenced in over 60 stories published in news outlets including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Forbes, the Associated Press, and the San Diego Union-Tribune, many featuring interviews with UHC Policy & Community Engagement Core leads Amy Carroll-Scott, PhD, MPH and Jennifer Kolker, MPH.

Read More

Latin America has been deeply impacted by COVID-19, bringing to light major implications for urban health and health equity research and policy. Urban physical and social environments, lack of health care infrastructure, environmental factors, and other social determinants of health have worsened the impact of the pandemic on Latin America and superimposed pre-existing health threats.

Dean Ana V. Diez Roux, MD, PHD, MPH, of the School of Public Health and Director of the UHC, and Claire Slesinski, MSPH, Senior Program Manager for Global Urban Health along with co-authors from throughout the Latin America region, discussed why the pandemic has impacted Latin American countries so severely and how it has compounded existing public health challenges. The physical and social environments of cities in Latin America and a lack of public health infrastructure have led to challenges in pandemic response. Segregation by social class and ethnicity has created a spatially patterned social and biological vulnerability to COVID-19 with poor and minority groups the most at risk of contracting and having complications. The pandemic has heightened the need for innovative policies that can address the pandemic

Read More

As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, researchers in public health who have been examining health inequities since before the pandemic are now being called upon to testify to the deepening consequences of inequality. Sharrelle Barber, ScD, MPH, assistant research professor at the UHC and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, is one of these public health researchers speaking to multiple media outlets on the health inequities being highlighted during this pandemic.

Read More

"Today over 4 billion people (more than half of the world’s population) live in cities. Cities are growing rapidly even in parts of the world that were largely rural just a few decades ago. But cities can be good or bad for health depending on how cities are organized and governed. Today the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the impact of urban living and urban policies on health like never before. Cities are, by definition, dense: a lot of people living together and interacting, socializing constantly. This is what gives cities their energy, their drive, their creativity. In the case of transmissible respiratory diseases like COVID-19 it is also why disease transmission can be accelerated in cities."

Read More

"Today over 4 billion people (more than half of the world’s population) live in cities. Cities are growing rapidly even in parts of the world that were largely rural just a few decades ago. But cities can be good or bad for health depending on how cities are organized and governed. Today the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the impact of urban living and urban policies on health like never before. Cities are, by definition, dense: a lot of people living together and interacting, socializing constantly. This is what gives cities their energy, their drive, their creativity. In the case of transmissible respiratory diseases like COVID-19 it is also why disease transmission can be accelerated in cities."

Read More

Latin America is not just highly urbanized. It is also one of the most economically unequal regions in the world: 8 of the world’s 20 most unequal countries are in Latin America. Latin America also has wide health inequalities in its largest cities, with life expectancy disparities between the areas with the highest and lowest life expectancy being above 10 years in several cities. The role of economic and health inequalities has not been frequently discussed in the context of the pandemic. Still, these inequalities may prove vital to understanding the causes and consequences of the pandemic in Latin American countries and cities.

Read More

The course, Confronting Organizational Stress as the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic Unfold was co-sponsored by West Philly Promise Neighborhood (WPPN) and was hosted as part of the UHC coronavirus response to support community organizations adapting to the pandemic. The course content will be available to registered participants for two months to complete at their own pace. Registration for this course is now closed.

Instructor: Sandra Bloom, MD, associate professor, Dornsife School of Public Health, Drexel University.

The Urban Health Collaborative and Drexel University's Dornsife School of Public Health experts joined together for an insightful discussion on the implications of the coronavirus pandemic for health in cities.

Panelists: Usama Bilal, PhD, MPH, MD, assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Dornsife and Urban Health Collaborative, and Jen Kolker, MPH, clinical professor, associate dean for Public Health Practice, Health Management and Policy at Dornsife

Moderator: Gina Lovasi, PhD, MPH, associate professor of urban health at Dornsife and co-director of the Urban Health Collaborative

Watch the webinar