Enhancing the Public Health Data Ecosystem for COVID-19 Prevention

Nelson and her team are building an integrated geospatial data ecosystem for all 58 California counties (population ~ 39M) for examining geographic clustering and unequal burden of COVID-19 by income, race/ethnicity, and household crowding, and other social determinants of health. The team has received substantial support from Google Cloud, which is providing a team of cloud and data engineers to build the platform by January 2021. This work will enable public health agencies to identify individual and contextual risk factors for SARS-CoV-2 infection and assess the needs of their most vulnerable community residents. Information could be used to identify structural or behavioral interventions to reduce risk of infection in public settings, as well as work with community organizations to address the adverse psychosocial and economic impact on disproportionately affected communities. More information about this program is provided in this article.