Los Angeles Times<\/em> showed a higher rate of infection among affluent communities that public health officials thought might be related to skewed access to testing.<\/p>\n“We’ve had very little success around gathering accurate information around testing,” Ferrer said. “The best we’ve been able to do to date is looking at zip code data.”<\/p>\n
The team has been collecting information for two weeks, but despite an order from the health officer obligating testing sites to maintain data on race and ethnicity, Ferrer said the county has little control over how forms are filled out at commercial testing labs recruited to help.<\/p>\n
“(We are) trying really hard to make sure that we’re not using the difficulty of getting data as an excuse for not understanding the issue,” Ferrer said.<\/p>\n
The department is working to gather data not only on access to testing, but also rates of hospitalization and mortality rates across racial and ethnic groups.<\/p>\n
Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and Native Alaskans suffer from higher rates of chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and asthma, making them more susceptible to contracting COVID-19 or requiring hospitalization once exposed to the virus.<\/p>\n
Immigrant families and others with few economic resources often live in close quarters that make it very difficult for anyone who is sick to self-isolate at home.<\/p>\n
Barger said the data would inform how resources are focused and said the county would likely build on health education and intervention campaigns already in place to help disproportionately impacted communities.<\/p>\n
“I believe that we are all in this together,” Barger said, noting that the first look at the numbers made “clear to us that this COVID-19 was impacting minorities far more than any other population.”<\/p>\n
The motion originally called for a report back in 30 days. After Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas asked for a seven-day turnaround and heard Ferrer’s comments on the work involved, the board settled on two weeks.<\/p>\n
Based on Ridley-Thomas’ motion, researchers will also seek data specific to essential employees who have continued to work with the public at critical businesses like grocery and drug stores.<\/p>\n
“We must have real-time demographic and socioeconomic data so that we can identify particularly vulnerable populations and allocate resources where they are needed most,” Ridley-Thomas said.<\/p>\n
Ridley-Thomas asked that the county health department’s Center for Health Equity contextualize the numbers and called for partnerships with academic and community organizations to guide the analysis.<\/p>\n
He said the work is particularly important given the size of Los Angeles County. Given shifts in the earliest reported data, he urged everyone to avoid drawing conclusions until the results are in.<\/p>\n
“We send a significant signal in terms of what we do and how we report it,” he said.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LOS ANGELES\u00a0 – The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Tuesday pushed to expedite and expand data gathering on the effect of the coronavirus on minority and impoverished communities, as well as essential workers continuing to serve the public during the crisis. Supervisors Hilda Solis and Kathryn Barger co-authored a motion to review racial and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":92483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1499,1496,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92540"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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