Report Publish Date: Spring 2023
This journal article, written and published during the COVID-19 pandemic, explores how to better monitor racial disparities in who gets the disease, is hospitalized for it, and dies from it.
The authors make several recommendations to improve how well public health surveillance systems can measure COVID-19 disparities so that policymakers and others working to reduce disparities can respond. The recommendations include:
Persistent racial/ethnic inequities in US COVID-19 diagnoses, hospitalizations, deaths, and other outcomes underscore the critical need to improve the capacity of public health surveillance systems to detect risks early and inform intervention efforts. Efforts to monitor and mitigate disparities have been hampered by in sufficient, inconsistent, and often in complete information on COVID-19 outcomes by race/ethnicity and variability in how different surveillance systems collect and report on similar sociodemographic factors and outcomes. Inadequate attention to racial health equity is a common challenge to reliable and effective monitoring and mitigation of disparities. To improve the reliability, validity, and utility with which health departments and other organizations monitor and report disparities, this article proposes a core minimum set of health indicators and best-practice standards in COVID-19 surveil lance systems for monitoring the current pandemic and future ones.
The authors scanned COVID-19 dashboards, surveillance systems, literature reviews, and focus groups with surveillance experts, consultations with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and an expert panel on surveillance. They used the Public Health Critical Race Praxis to conduct their review.
“As the pandemic evolves, so too will the information needs of policymakers, public health departments, health care systems, and others seeking to address COVID-related inequities.”
—Nina T. Harawa, Bita Amani, Consuela Abotsi-Kowu, Ezinne Nwankwo, and Chandra L. Ford, UCLA-CDU COVID-19 Task Force
“Improving the capacity of public health agencies, elected officials, and communities to mitigate racial/ethnic and other disparities in public health pandemics requires standardizing how COVID-19-related information is collected by laboratories, testing sites, providers, and health systems; how it is transferred between systems; and how it is compiled by local agencies,” the authors write. In the future, these standards can be applied to other health emergencies, they say.
Inadequate attention to racial health equity is a common challenge to effective, reliable monitoring and mitigation of COVID-19 disparities. Efforts to monitor and mitigate COVID-19 disparities are hampered by inadequacies in how surveillance systems collect, tabulate, and report COVID-19-related outcomes. We conducted environmental scans of existing public health surveillance systems and reporting standards, literature reviews, focus groups with surveillance experts, and consultations with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and an expert panel on surveillance to identify and explore strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in how existing systems monitor COVID-19 and their implications for addressing disparities in related outcomes. We present recommendations based on these reviews and propose a core minimum set of health indicators and best-practice standards for reporting these indicators by COVID-19 surveillance systems to monitor racial/ethnic and other disparities in the pandemic. These recommendations are relevant to monitoring disparities in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and may inform monitoring of future epidemics. This discussion is part of an effort by Project REFOCUS to develop syndemic surveillance systems for monitoring the intersecting pandemics of COVID-19 and racism.
Ethn Dis. 2022;32(2):151-164; doi:10.18865/ed.32.2.151
This study and report was conducted and created by the following people.
