New voices lend their insights to advance equity in the Atlas

The US COVID Atlas welcomes our Community Advisory Board

Data from the beginning of the pandemic have revealed stark disparities in COVID cases, deaths, and vaccination rates across race, class, geographic opportunity, work, and many other axis of marginalization. In truth, COVID inequities appear to map onto many of the other health inequities that have plagued our nation for decades.

Why, and how come we didn’t see this coming?

In many ways, some of the communities hardest hit by COVID were sounding the alarms early, to little avail. One painful lesson that we’ve learned from the pandemic is that when marginalized, racialized, and disenfranchised communities and voices are ignored, inequities prevail. It’s a lesson that is repeated too often as public health systems, policymakers, the media, and researchers, including data science experts, often exclude diverse voices in dialogue and decision making .

From the inception of the COVID Atlas, our team has attempted to disrupt these power imbalances by centering equity at the forefront of our efforts. Indeed, our initial push to map COVID data at the county level was in an effort to highlight heterogeneity and inequities that may have been masked by state level data. We engaged in a participatory-approach to the design of the ATLAS by convening stakeholders and users to offer feedback. And many of the tools in the ATLAS include equity-focused metrics such as:

• social determinants of health variables and community health indicators
• regional overlays that display hypersegregated communities, tribal lands, and Black belt communities,
• social mobility data generated from mobile phone activity, and the share of essential workers in a county from Census records

This week the Atlas launched a new initiative with equity in mind: the convening of our Community Advisory Board (CAB).

In the spirit of community-engaged and community based participatory research practices, Community Advisory Boards have historically aimed to re-strike the balance between researchers and communities . In our CAB, we have invited experts, leaders, and change-makers to lend their insights and perspectives on the forthcoming work of the Atlas team. In particular, we’ve asked our CAB members to advise and guide us in answering the following questions:

• Focus: Are we executing our goals?
• Prioritization: What should we being doing with our resources to make the biggest impact?
• Relationships: Who else can or should we be working with to accomplish our goals?

Meet some of our board members

From our first meeting, it’s clear we have a dynamic group with a wide variety of experiences, viewpoints, and strengths. We aimed to invite both senior and junior-level members who have experience working with and in communities and settings that have been hardest impacted by the pandemic — indigenous and immigrant communities, healthcare settings, rural regions, and the South, among others. We are also joined by data wonks as well as those who do very little with data, to better understand how different types of folks may engage with the Atlas.

Some of our CAB members include:

• Jay Bhatt, a physician executive and public health innovator working on healthcare transformation and improving healthcare outcomes
• Jim Bloyd, who has worked in local public health department across his career and is part of the Collaborative for Health Equity Cook County, which aims to build people power to challenge structural racism and policies of white supremacy.
• Simone Browne, a tech and data ethicists who examines the social and ethical implications of surveillance technologies, particularly among Black communities.
• Germán Cadenas, who studies undocumented immigrants and underrepresented minorities with a focus on education, career, and psychological health
• Laurie Francis, a healthcare leader working on the frontlines of FQHCs in rural areas and envisioning how healthcare systems can transform social determinants of health
• Marjorie Givens, a public health expert with wide ranging experience including leading the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps program (where the Atlas draws data from!).
• Daryl McGraw, who champions efforts in criminal justice reform, addiction recovery, and community integration for the formerly incarcerated
• Jamelle Watson-Daniels, who works to make big data, tech, algorithms, and so on more equitable, accountable, and useful for collective action as the Research Director of Data 4 Black Lives
• Joseph (Sïraata) Yracheta, the Executive Director of of the Native Biodata Consortium, working to ensure that advances in genomics, omics, machine learning and health research benefit all Indigenous people
• Amy Zhang, a sociology doctoral student who works with the AAPI COVID-19 project, a mixed-methods research collaborative investigating how the COVID-19 pandemic impacts the lives of Asians, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders in the United State

Next Steps

We plan to convene our CAB quarterly to discuss the developments of the Atlas, our team’s work, and major initiatives moving forward. In the meantime, we’ve invited our board to try their hand at the Atlas Scavenger Hunt to learn more about the tools in the Atlas. We invite you to also play along with them!

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