Vaccination intentions generate racial disparities in the societal persistence of COVID-19

Context and Considerations for the Development of Community-Informed Health Communication Messaging to Support Equitable Uptake of COVID-19 Vaccines Among Communities of Color in Washington, DC

BACKGROUND

Communities of color have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. We explored barriers and facilitators to COVID-19 vaccine uptake among African American, Latinx, and African immigrant communities in Washington, DC.

METHODS

A total of 76 individuals participated in qualitative interviews and focus groups, and 208 individuals from communities of color participated in an online crowdsourcing contest.

RESULTS

Findings documented a lack of sufficient, accurate information about COVID-19 vaccines and questions about the science. African American and African immigrant participants spoke about the deeply rooted historical underpinnings to their community's vaccine hesitancy, citing the prior and ongoing mistreatment of people of color by the medical community. Latinx and African immigrant participants highlighted how limited accessibility played an important role in the slow uptake of COVID-19 vaccines in their communities. Connectedness and solidarity were found to be key assets that can be drawn upon through community-driven responses to address social-structural challenges to COVID-19 related vaccine uptake.

CONCLUSIONS

The historic and ongoing socio-economic context and realities of communities of color must be understood and respected to inform community-based health communication messaging to support vaccine equity for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.

Open Debates Conducive for Vaccination Rate Flatlines: A Scoping Review and Convergent Cross Mapping

COVID-19 pandemic is fueling digital health transformation-accelerating innovations of digital health services, surveillance, and interventions, whereas hastening social contagion of deliberate infodemic. The USA and many other countries are experiencing a resurgent wave of the COVID-19 pandemic with vaccination rate slowdown, making policymaking fraught with challenges. Political leaders and scientists have publicly warned of a "pandemic of the unvaccinated," reinforcing their calls for citizens to get jabs. However, some scientists accused elites of stigmatizing the unvaccinated people and undermining the moral pillars of public health. Following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, we first reviewed the nuances of stakeholders involved in the ongoing debates and revealed the potential consequences of divisive pronouncements to provide perspectives to reframe extensible discussions. Then, we employed the convergent cross mapping (CCM) model to reveal the uncharted knock-on effects of the contentious tsunami in a stakeholders-oriented policymaking framework, coupled with rich metadata from the GDELT project and Google Trends. Our experimental findings suggest that current news coverage may shape the mindsets of the vaccines against the unvaccinated, thereby exacerbating the risk of dualistic antagonism in algorithmically infused societies. Finally, we briefly summarized how open debates are conducive to increasing vaccination rates and bolstering the outcomes of impending policies for pandemic preparedness.

Identifying the shifting sources to predict the dynamics of COVID-19 in the U.S

Mobility restriction is a crucial measure to control the transmission of the COVID-19. Research has shown that effective distance measured by the number of travelers instead of physical distance can capture and predict the transmission of the deadly virus. However, these efforts have been limited mainly to a single source of disease. Also, they have not been tested on finer spatial scales. Based on prior work of effective distances on the country level, we propose the multiple-source effective distance, a metric that captures the distance for the virus to propagate through the mobility network on the county level in the U.S. Then, we estimate how the change in the number of sources impacts the global mobility rate. Based on the findings, a new method is proposed to locate sources and estimate the arrival time of the virus. The new metric outperforms the original single-source effective distance in predicting the arrival time. Last, we select two potential sources and quantify the arrival time delay caused by the national emergency declaration. In doing so, we provide quantitative answers on the effectiveness of the national emergency declaration.