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Exploring the nexus between social vulnerability, built environment, and the prevalence of COVID-19: A case study of Chicago.

ABSTRACT: COVID-19 has significantly and unevenly impacted the United States, disproportionately affecting socially vulnerable communities. While epidemiologists and public health officials have suggested social distancing and shelter-in-place orders to halt the spread of this virus, the ability to comply with these guidelines is dependent on neighborhood, household, and individual characteristics related to social vulnerability. We use structural equation modeling and multiple data sources, including anonymized mobile phone location data from SafeGraph, to examine the effects of different social vulnerability and built environment factors on COVID-19 prevalence over two overlapping time periods (March to May and March to November of 2020). We use Chicago, Illinois as a case study and find that zip codes with low educational attainment consistently experienced higher case rates over both periods. Though population density was not significantly related to the prevalence in any period, movement of people made a significant contribution only during the longer time period. This finding highlights the significance of analyzing different timeframes for understanding social vulnerability. Our results suggest social vulnerability played an influential role in COVID-19 prevalence, highlighting the needs to address socioeconomic barriers to pandemic recovery and future pandemic response.

SUBMITTER: Kashem SB

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8459204 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Complex environmental, economic, and social conditions in the places we live provide strong cues to our longevity, livelihood, and well-being. Although often distinct and evolving relatively independently, health disparity, social vulnerability and environmental justice research and practice intertwine and inform one another. Together, they increasingly provide evidence of how social processes intensify disasters almost predictably giving rise to inequitable disruptions and consequences. The domino and cumulative effects of cascading disasters invariably reveal inequities through differential impacts and recovery opportunities across communities and subgroups of people. Not only do cascading disasters reveal and produce inequitable effects, the cascade itself can emerge out of compounded nested social structures. Drawing on, and integrating, theory and practice from social vulnerability, health inequity, and environmental justice, this paper presents a comprehensive conceptual model of cascading disasters that offers a people-centric lens. The CHASMS conceptual model (Cascading Hazards to disAsters that are Socially constructed eMerging out of Social Vulnerability) interrogates the tension between local communities and the larger structural forces that produce social inequities at multiple levels, capturing how those inequities lead to cascading disasters. We apply the model to COVID-19 as an illustration of how underlying inequities give rise to foreseeable inequitable outcomes, emphasizing the U.S. experience. We offer Kenya and Puerto Rico as examples of cumulative effects and possible cascades when responding to other events in the shadow of COVID-19. COVID-19 has vividly exposed the dynamic, complex, and intense relevance of placing social conditions and structures at the forefront of cascading disaster inquiry and practice. The intensity of social disruption and the continuation of the pandemic will, no doubt, perpetuate and magnify chasms of injustice.

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Exploring the nexus between social vulnerability, built environment, and the prevalence of COVID-19: A case study of Chicago.

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