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Communicating about racial equity and COVID-19: Connecting data to context

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Reading Amanda Windle's briefing note I was struck by the question of trust and authority, particularly its absence, and the challenges that raises for crafting a communications strategy for The Simon Community and, by extension, other communities.

In watching the US Senate Panel question public health experts, the inherent distrust toward science and scientists by many republican senators and Lt Governors remains alarming. Conversely Goldman Sach's recently issued a report that wearing masks could save the US economy a 5% hit to the GDP. If this report has an impact, will it signal that economists are more trustworthy that public health officials, or simply that monetary value is the only value that counts in COVID communications. 

I am thinking about the interplay of these differing scales of authority and trust and how difficult it is for individuals, families and local communities and care groups to make sense of the competing messages in order to craft a reasonable, sensible strategy for negotiating risk.

The main findings of the article are that the relationship between natural disasters and communicable diseases is not as much due to dead bodies or high trauma as it is to population displacement and a lack of preparredness of the local governing body for the disaster and the crowding of survivors that follows a disaster as this

1: Crowding is shown to be common in displaced populations, and local overpopulation/crowding often facillitates the transmittion of disease

2: Natural disasters that do not cause a displacement of a population are rarely associated with disease outbreaks

3: There is little or no evidence that dead bodies, as some believe, pose a epidemic risk for a population of survivors after a disaster has struck

"The risk for commuicable disease transmission after disasters is associated primarily with the size and characteristics of the population displaced, specifically the proximity of safe water adn functioning latrines, the nutritional status of the displaced population, the level of immunuty to vaccine-preventable diseases..., and the access to healthcare services"

"...natural disasters (regardless of type) that do not result in population displacement are rarely associated with outbreaks"

"When death is directly due to the natural disaster, human remains do not pose a rise for outbreaks"

The main methods that the authors appear to use are reported data from disasters that have happened around the globe, including numbers and types of infections, displacement and crowding data, and knowledge of the disaster incidents examined

Emergency response is addressed in a broad sense of the major risk factors associated with a natural disaster and epidemics. The main points they make are that preparedness, with a focus on availability of safe water and primary healthcare services, along with surveillance for the beginnings of an epidemic, are necessessay for a strong response to a disaster situation   

This article has been referenced in a wide variety of emergency medicine journal articles, ranging from flood protocols, use of cell phones in disaster enviroments, earthquakes and medical complications, to the costs of disaster consequences. Many of the articles referencing this paper appear to go into greater depth for some of the epidemics and diseases that were touched on in the research article. These include hepatitis E, Leptospirosis, cholera, and tetanus.

The object of the study is the evidence in an increase of various types of epidemics (cholera, malaria, menigitis, tetnus, etc) due to displacement of a populatoin from a natural diasaster. Examples of natural disasters discussed include- hurricanes, cyclones, earthquakes and flooding. Despite popular belief (and scientific evidence) deaths due to natural diasters do not spread diasese; unless cause of widespread infection is due to contaminated water sources, malnutrition, residing in a third world country,access to healthcare and adequate bathroom facilities. These points are supported through statistics from the past twenty or more years.

The study is published under emerging infectious diseases from the CDC. The CDC publishes important information about the possibility of widespread infection (such as Zika) and offers ways to avoid outbreak and prevent further infection. The publication is very credible necause the CDC is cited by the government and on various news sources as a way of staying 'safe' from diasese.