Tracking Covid-19 Inequities Across Jurisdictions Represented in the Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC)
The COVID-19 Health Inequities in BCHC Cities Dashboard
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Report Publish Date: May 25, 2022
This journal article describes the creation of the COVID-19 Health Inequities in Big Cities Health Coalition Cities Dashboard.
Primary Takeaways
As part of a project to track outcomes and inequalities in cities during the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors developed a dashboard that allows users to compare and visualize COVID-19 in a single city and between cities over time. They encountered the following challenges:
- Frequent changes in available data
- Difficulty updating the data
- Differing definitions of what constitutes a city
- Local health departments with limited resources to respond to customized data requests
Overview and Objectives
The authors wanted to “advance the understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic from an equity and urban health perspective across 30 large US cities that are members of the Big Cities Health Coalition,” they write.
Hypothesis or Approach
The authors designed the dashboard in four phases:
- Define objectives and audience: The authors wanted to show COVID-19 inequities and make it easy for people to compare them across cities, promote further research on what creates inequities, and create data that can be used to evaluate and inform public health policies and strategies. Their audience was public health practitioners and public health researchers.
- Develop an equity framework: The authors discuss the systems and structures that create inequities at the individual, neighborhood, and city level.
- Compile data: The authors defined the geographic area of each city and identified five outcomes to include: number of tests, test positivity, incidence, hospitalizations, and deaths. They used social indicators from the American Community Survey and other sources.
- Build the dashboard: The authors used an iterative process and open-source web tools.
How This Influences Change
“Describing and quantifying the magnitude of COVID-19 inequities allows for comparisons across urban areas, which can help public health practitioners understand drivers of health and health inequities, target resources, and identify effective policies,” the authors write.
Research: Go Deeper
Objectives: To describe the creation of an interactive dashboard to advance the understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic from an equity and urban health perspective across 30 large US cities that are members of the Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC).
Methods: We leveraged the Drexel-BCHC partnership to define the objectives and audience for the dashboard and developed an equity framework to conceptualize COVID-19 inequities across social groups, neighborhoods, and cities. We compiled data on COVID-19 trends and inequities by race/ethnicity, neighborhood, and city, along with neighborhood- and city-level demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, and built an interactive dashboard and Web platform to allow interactive comparisons of these inequities across cities.
Results: We launched the dashboard on January 21, 2021, and conducted several dissemination activities. As of September 2021, the dashboard included data on COVID-19 trends for the 30 cities, on inequities by race/ethnicity in 21 cities, and on inequities by neighborhood in 15 cities.
Conclusions: This dashboard allows public health practitioners to contextualize racial/ethnic and spatial inequities in COVID-19 across large US cities, providing valuable insights for policymakers.
Am J Public Health, June 2022. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306708
Research Team
This study and report was conducted and created by the following people.
- Bilal U
- McCulley E
- Li R
- Rollins H
- Schnake-Mahl A
- Mullachery PH
- Vaidya V
- Koh C
- Dureja K
- Sharaf A
- Furukawa A
- Juliano C
- Barber S
- Kolder J
- Diez Roux AV
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