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Ernesto Yerena Montejano, currently a Boyle Heights resident and originally from Imperial County, and his team of fellow artists Arlene Mejorado and Ayerim Leon — complete with friends and families" painted the mura.

It belongs to the Imperial Valley, but was one of 14 California commissions art projects as part of a collaboration between the Governor's Office, CA Dept of Public Health and The Center at Sierra Health Foundation. The commissioning program aimed to raise awareness about Covid19 within the State's hardest hit areas. Each an governmental agency stakeholder in the project along with curators who selected the artist for this mural.

The building's owner, which appears to be a someone poised to sell it soon is also a stakeholder and most importantly, local resident are active stakeholders as they began adding names of family members who died because of Covid on the western corner of the mural unprompted and without explicit instruction or permission.

The mural is located at 739 N. Imperial Avenue in El Centro. It is precariously positioned because although the current owner of the building has promised to protect it for the next 6 months (per Jun 10, 2021), the next owner of the building may cover over the mural. The mural was completed over 1 week by 5+ painters under the direction of  the artist Ernesto Yerena Montejano on May 30, 2021.

It brings together community members to commorate the toll Covid 19 has taken on the community. It provides a public service message to continue masking and thereby taking care of the community. And it adds an element of beauty and artfulness to what was a run-down building exterior

The mural covers the entire side of one building. The background is painted in purples, blue and yellow. One side of the wall is painted "Protege A Nuestra Comunidad!"|"Protect our Community!"

The centerpiece of the mural both figuratively and literally is a beautiful woman (anywhere beteween 20-40yo) in traditional dress with two long strands of brown braided hair holding a bouquet of colorful flowers tied together with a yellow sash. She is wear a face mask to back up the Covid-19 theme.

The flowers she holds is both a reference to the business--"Cynthia's Flower Connection" which has since moved as well as a tribute to the community and their deceased members who died of Covid. One indication is that community members began adding names to the side of the mural as a tribute to lost family members.

This mural is a public-works project commissioned by the State and agencies. It was created by an artist who has ties to the area. It is also meant to be a public health message, another way to reach local residents who have been "locked in"

“Right away we saw how powerful the mural was in bringing people together, especially after this year where we've been locked in and it's been hard to communicate with our community,” he said. Per David Varela, “People are slowly making their way to the mural and are able to mourn a little bit too,” Varela said. “It's really healthy to mourn and I think people are getting a chance to do that through the mural. I knew we'd not only get a beautiful mural, but a powerful message.”

The Covid-19 Pandemic Vulnerability Index (PVI) Dashboard, which relies on the Toxicological Prioritization Index (ToxiPi) to integrate diverse data into a geospatial context.

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). COVID-19 Pandemic Vulnerability Index (PVI) Dashboard. 2021. Available online: https://covid19pvi.niehs.nih.gov/ (accessed on 24 July 2021).

The PVI dashboard is included in the CDCD’s Covid-19 Data Tracker as part of the “Unique Populations” tab.  

NIEHS also developed Covid-19 PVI lesson plans for high school students (grades 9 – 12) to learn to examine risk factors associated with Covid-19 using the index. The goals of the curriculum are to provide students with a tool for examining the spread and health outcomes of a pandemic, to promote their awareness of how various factors (biological, social, behavioral, etc.) impact disease spread and outcomes, and to support the development of prevention and intervention strategies that reduce exposures to risk factors and their adverse health impacts. The lesson plans highlight the significance of social and environmental determinants in public health.

Learning objectives of the curriculum include:

• Knowing what a mathematical model is, the purpose of using a mathematical model
• How to examine the social factors contributing to the spread of infectious disease
• How to analyze the environmental factors that contribute to the spread of infectious disease
• Knowing about intervention strategies that could mitigate the impact of infectious disease on public health

The PVI dashboard was also used by anthropologist Jayajit Chakraborty to examine the relationship between Covid-19 vulnerability and disability status in the US. Chakraborty applied the dashboard and data from the 2019 American Community Survey to investigate whether vulnerability to the pandemic has been significantly greater in counties containing higher percentages of people with disabilities in four timeframes from May 2020 to February 2021. Chakraborty found that the percentage of people with disabilities (as well as those reporting other cognitive, vision, ambulatory, self-care and independent living difficulties) was significantly greater in counties with the highest 20% of the PVI. Chakraborty calls for further research to better understand the adverse impacts of Covid-19 on PwDs (people with disabilities).

Chakraborty, J. Vulnerability to the COVID-19 Pandemic for People with Disabilities in the U.S. Disabilities 2021, 1, 278-285. https://doi.org/10.3390/disabilities1030020

The index produces an overall score derived from 12 indicators distributed across four domains (current infection rates, baseline population concentration, current interventions, and health and environmental vulnerabilities. Each vulnerability factor is represented as a slide of a radar chart (see below).

The dashboard can also be used to visualize changes over time in cases, deaths, PVI, and PVI rank (with a line chart and a bar chart), as well as predicted changes in cases and deaths (with a line chart), see below.

Additional visual layers can be added to the PVI map (e.g. number of cases and deaths).

The PVI offers a visual synthesis of information to monitor disease trajectories, identify local vulnerabilities, forecast outcomes, and guide an informed response (e.g. allocating resources). This includes short-term, local predictions of cases and deaths. The PVI dashboard creates profiles (called PVI scorecards) for every county in the United States.

The PVI dashboard can be customized to specific needs by adding or removing layers of information, filtering by region, or clustering by profile similarity. The Predictions panel connects historical tracking to local forecasts of cases and deaths. The dashboard applies an integrated concept of vulnerability composed of both dynamic (infection rate and interventions) and static (community population and health care access) factors.

The statistical modeling supporting the PVI dashboard (generalized linear models of cumulative outcome data) has indicated that following population size, the most significant predictors of cases and deaths were the proportion of Black residents, mean fine particulate matter [particulate matter ≤2.5μm in diameter (PM2.5)], percentage of population with insurance coverage, and proportion of Hispanic residents.

The ToxPi*GIS framework, from which the PVI was built, is a free tool that integrates data streams from different sources into interactive profiles that overlay geographic information systems (GIS) data. This enables people using the tool to compare, cluster, and evaluate the sensitivity of a statistical framework to component data streams. In other words, this enables the integration of data that are not normally compared (data are combined into a matrix comprised of various domains or categories, varying weights and represented by color schemes).

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