On March 14, when the coronavirus pandemic invaded the United States, Sema Sgaier and her team of scientists accumulated in an urgent, improvised assembly with an agenda item: locating a way to fight the virus and save lives, and locate it quickly.
The brainstorming consultation at the Surgo Foundation, a non-profit fitness knowledge analysis organization, came up with an innovative idea. The team would create an online knowledge tool that can identify regions, villages and even neighborhoods at risk of coronavirus infection, and the economic and social consequences that result.
However, building it in the midst of an immediate contagion by killing a lot of other people a day, filling full-capacity hospitals and forcing entire states to lock themselves in, meant inhabiting a scathing Michael Crichton novel: intense and marathon days of work in search of answers, restless nights concerned about what has been lost, an imaginary clock spinning in the background.
“It’s like living in a thriller, and we were the protagonists,” says Sgaier, a complete medical scientist and global fitness expert who is Surgo’s co-founder and CEO.
The result of these paintings is the COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index, or CCVI, an online tool that combines the knowledge of the box with the science of human behavior. Together, this data can assess the likelihood that a paint network will be affected by the pandemic and the most likely effect it will have on its residents.
Created from public information, adding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Census Bureau. And other official sources, the tool is designed to help municipal officials and public fitness analysts assess threat levels for individual communities, anticipate what might happen. if the virus moves and prepares accordingly.
But like the virus itself, the CCVI has revealed socioeconomic disparities in the physical state, long-standing inequalities hidden with the naked eye.
[Read: Coronavirus Disparities: “Poverty Is What Kills People”]
“All networks in the U.S. They will be affected through COVID-19, although the effects will not be the same in each one,” according to a description on the CCVI home page. The index, continues, “identifies the communities that might want the maximum as the coronavirus takes over. Mapped in census areas, counties, and state levels, CCVI is helping determine COVID-19 plans and mitigation at the granular level. “.
The point of detail is not surprising, given Sgaier’s background.
A complete neuroscientist with complex Ivy League degrees in mobile and molecular biology, she worked on human genome mapping as a researcher at Harvard University School of Medicine. But her public fitness businesses are just as impressive: before joining T.H. of Harvard Chan School of Public Health as an adjunct professor, she spent six years in HIV/AIDS prevention in India and Africa for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, behavioral sciences and knowledge mapping to combat virus transmission.
In creating the CCVI, “Our purpose was to think about how to make public aptitude more effective, how we bring greater accuracy” to the discipline, Sgaier says. With regard to COVID-19, he says, “For too long, we’ve been trapped in this ‘now’ moment,” reacting to an ongoing typhoon predicting where it might hit next.
[Read: Meet the woman, the world’s best-known coronavirus tracker.]
Using the data, he says, experts will possibly wonder if a network can withstand this typhoon and what resources will be mobilized in advance to help it recover. “It would possibly be about physical condition and mortality, but it can also be about other issues,” such as access to food, quality of housing and medicine, and transportation and the ability of citizens to take refuge on site or isolate themselves if necessary.
“I was interested in how we protected our most vulnerable communities,” Sgaier says. “Where do you have support for this point of vulnerability? Is it tall, medium or low? As a community, are we ready? Will the pandemic be a death sentence for some communities?”
The CCVI can also cause policy makers to identify “test deserts”: urban and rural communities without coronavirus testing infrastructure, Sgaier says. This is important, she says, because the coronavirus will “stay with us.”
For example, the CCVI tool found that nearly two-thirds of all rural counties in the United States do not have a coronavirus control site, a hole that includes 20.7 million people living in what the Surgo Foundation identifies as “rural control deserts.” “But the research also revealed inequalities within this inequality: it revealed that 1.27 million rural African-Americans live in controlled deserts, or more than a third of the rural black population.
In addition, the CCVI found that black rural citizens are twice as likely as the general rural population to live in a control desert, and nearly 3 times more likely to live in a highly vulnerable control desert, explained as a rural network without verification sites and an increasing rate of COVID-19 infection.
Research shows how the tool explores knowledge to reveal endangered communities that tend to be overlooked, Sgaier says.
“Is it an elderly population that we will have to protect and protect? Or it’s a very poor network” with high-density multigenerational homes, she says. “We want to think about (these factors) when we implement, for example, social distance policies that the network would struggle with,” he said.
This appears to be the case in Arizona, a state that the Surgo Foundation targeted in a time after the progression of the CCVI tool. A resulting case review is irrefutable: “We find that our granular knowledge and research predicted that disproportionate ones have an effect on the pandemic in Arizona’s most vulnerable communities,” it reads.
A series of “underlying vulnerabilities, known months before the pandemic reached its peak,” adding checks deserts and health care shortages, “exacerbated the effects of political decisions and led to particularly high viral spread in Native Americans and the Arizona border. Regions.” The beak occurred after orders from the house were lifted, according to the study.
[See: Fear, Courage, Grit: Meet more than 50 “hospital heroes” in pictures.]
Knowledge as Arizona counties along the U.S.-Mexico border should be predicted to “be guilty of recent immediate expansion into capital-consistent cases in Arizona, joining already affected Native American communities,” according to the Review Released in July. At the same time, counties that Surgo knew as highly vulnerable in early March were disproportionately affected by infections in the weeks following the start of the state’s reopening through Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican.
And dramatic declines in social estrangement in the inner communities of the state, adding Coconino and La Paz counties, may be only major signs of expansion in per capita case expansion, according to the study.
Although Sgaier worked on the Ebola crisis in Africa and HIV prevention in poverty zones in India, “I never worked on a crisis where (a contagion) was so new,” he says. “What we know (about coronavirus) today compared to what we knew on March 14 is very different.”
But maximum fitness emergencies have one thing in common, Sgaier says: they can be mitigated, or defeated, with preparation.
“The effect of COVID can be prevented if we act early, and if we do the right thing, we can actually win this virus. It doesn’t have to be like this,” he said. “The key message is that we are all at risk. But most importantly, we all have a duty to protect each other.”
Joseph P. Williams writes for healthier communities, exploring and researching social determinants of health, adding poverty, racial inequality, and access to care. He joined the U.S.News and World Report in 2014 as editor-in-chief and in the News section, which covers national news, politics and the U.S. Supreme Court. Prior to joining U.S.News, Williams worked as an editor at Blue Nation Review; as a political analyst for print, television and radio, adding “The Jeff Santos Show” and “Washington Watch with Roland Martin”; and as a White House editor and reporter for Politico. Previously, Williams worked as an editor and living assistant in Washington, D.C., head of the Boston Globe, deputy local news editor at the Star Tribune, Minnesota, and a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. A graduate of the University of Richmond, Williams won a Nieman Scholarship from Harvard University in 1995 to examine the race and justice system. Follow him on Twitter, join him on LinkedIn or email him to [email protected].