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Community health workers, sometimes called health navigators, played a key role in the public health response to COVID-19, especially among communities of color. This report describes how the community health workforce can be developed by public health departments and shares findings from a community health worker training program focused on vaccination, prevention, and contact tracing.

Behind every statistic on health outcomes, there are human beings – people, families, and communities. Data visualizations can often overlook this fact but should seek to honor the lived experience of those impacted in inequitable ways. This post explores ways that justice and personhood can be embedded in data visualizations, such as highlighting individual stories within a larger group to humanize quantitative information for the reader.

This guide from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation offers best practices and suggestions in how people can frame discussions on health equity and social determinants. Its focus is on effective rhetoric. This includes the use of accessible language to talk about disparities, leading with arguments that your audience is likely to find agreeable, and focusing messaging on one or two compelling facts.

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the role systemic inequities play in health and health care. Health professions education and training should include guidance on how to address these inequities and how to have deep conversations within our learning institutions. This article outlines a novel framework for training health professionals and health professional educators to communicate about diversity, equity, and inclusion more effectively. The framework embraces a dialogue model called “medical improv.” Key elements of this model include examinations of identity and positionality, caretaking and team-making, and conversations with a skeptic.

This case study of the VA Puget Sound Health Care System highlights effective practices for increasing vaccine uptake among vulnerable populations of veterans. This included targeting outreach to people based on race/ethnicity and the presence of risk factors for severe COVID-19 disease. The VA Puget Sound Health Care System used multiple modalities of communications and collaborated with community leaders in order to increase vaccine rates among people in underserved areas.

Johns Hopkins Health System and Baltimore community organizations collaborated to establish a bilingual COVID-19 hotline and implement free COVID-19 testing. When a vaccine became available, partnerships made within these efforts were leveraged and the coalition partnered with the state. This community-based approach was effective at expanding access to the COVID-19 vaccine among low-income Latino immigrants.

This article identifies levels of vaccine hesitancy and acceptance among people experiencing homelessness. It gives public health practitioners information on ways to address the relatively higher levels of hesitancy among this population and encourages logistical barriers such as transportation to be addressed as part of a larger strategy.

This article is an overall summary of long COVID, its risk factors, and ways to address it. Many of the risk factors identified are clinical, yet some management options include self-treatment.

The NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene partnered with 45 businesses or faith-based organizations in the Northeast Bronx to increase COVID-19 and flu vaccine knowledge and uptake in predominantly Black and Hispanic areas. The program disseminated health information through trusted community leaders to address vaccine hesitancy. ZIP codes with higher involvement in the program showed greater increases in vaccination rates.

This research paper discusses various public health agency websites and official government websites in countries with more than 5,000 confirmed COVID cases. The researchers used various methods to determine the readability level of the websites. The researchers found that official COVID information put out by states often exceeded the recommended reading level, while federal information was found to be much more readable, most likely due to federal mandates for readability. Recommendations are to use plain-language COVID resources to be more accessible to all audiences.