Community organizations outperform hospitals in COVID-19 awareness

Findings of a study out of Rutgers University show that while thinking globally has its place, acting locally may be more effective in the Black and Latino communities of the Garden State, at least when it comes to educating the public about how to access free COVID-19 testing.

The research team focused on COVID-19 testing and awareness in four New Jersey Black and Latino communities from May through December 2021. They compared the level of communication provided by health care organizations (HCOs) to that of community-based organizations (CBOs), such as NGOs. While they found that age, language, insurance status, and other factors all affected whether any given person would seek and complete a COVID-19 test, CBOs far outperformed HCOs in getting the word out about testing resources.

“Although the odds of completing an at-home COVID-19 test were higher for people recruited by HCOs, community-based organizations were significantly more effective at raising awareness of testing opportunities,” said study co-author Emily Barrett.

The participating CBOs ranged from local chapters of the NAACP to the NIH-funded New Jersey Healthcare Essential Worker Outreach and Education Study – Testing Overlooked Occupations, or HEROES TOO. The study placed no limits on which methods the CBOs could use to reach out to residents with information about how to access free COVID-19 testing. Of the 1100 individual participants completed an online questionnaire, 94% were recruited by CBO participants, blowing the HCOs out of the water.

It became clear early in the COVID-19 pandemic that nonwhite Americans, especially Black Americans, were skeptical of the health care system and the government with respect to COVID-19 and its vaccines. Researchers attribute this to the country’s long history of systemic racism in health care, most famously the U.S. Department of Public Health’s “Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male in Macon County, Alabama,” in which over 600 African-American men were told they were being treated for syphilis, when in fact the researchers merely documented the disease’s progression. The study continued for nearly thirty years after the cure for syphilis became publicly available.

Read the full study in the American Journal of Public Health.

The Johnson & Johnson Corporate Foundation, Danisco, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and the University of Massachusetts provided funds to some of the researchers who participated in this work.