Tracking Inequities in COVID-19 Related Outcomes in Select U.S. Cities - Narrative Brief

Narrative Brief
January 2021

View the brief: Tracking Inequities in COVID-19 Related Outcomes in Select U.S. Cities [PDF]

Overview

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.

More details on the UHC COVID-19 Equity Framework can be found by visiting the COVID-19 inequities dashboard.

About the Dashboard

The COVID-19 Health Inequities in Cities dashboard provides descriptive data of how COVID-19 related outcomes, and especially inequities in these outcomes, are evolving in the BCHC cities. We use available data to characterize, compare, and track inequities along three dimensions (1) across subgroups of individuals within cities; (2) across neighborhoods within cities, and (3) across cities. You can view the dashboard by visiting the website: COVID-19 Health Inequities in Cities.

Sections include:

1. City Reports
2. Trends Across Cities
3. Individual Level Inequities
4. Neighborhood Level Inequities
5. City Level Inequities

Interactive visualizations in the dashboard allow users to select variables or cities, and provide tooltips to assist in interpretation.

View the full brief Tracking Inequities in COVID-19 Related Outcomes in Select U.S. Cities [PDF] for explanations of the dashboard's city reports, trends across cities, key individual-level inequities, neighborhood-level inequities, and data limitations.

Citation:

Barber, S., Bilal, U., Diez Roux, A., Furukawa, A., Koh, C., Kolker, J., Li, R., McCulley, E., Rollins, H., Schnake-Mahl, A., Sharaf, A., Vaidya, V. (2021). Tracking Inequities in COVID-19 Related Outcomes in Select Cities. Urban Health Collaborative.