COVID-19 and Health Inequities Seminar Series

Seminars took place weekly on Thursdays from 2:00 – 3:00pm ET between September 24 and October 22, 2020. 

The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has disproportionately affected communities of color, people living in poverty, and other marginalized groups. Speakers will explore how COVID-19 exposure risk, the quality of COVID-19-specific medical care, and social determinants of health contribute to disparate trends in COVID-19 infection and mortality seen in the United States. Speakers will be asked to comment on the major public health needs, such as data collection and studies performed, that are required to support a more equitable pandemic response. 

After attending this seminar series, participants will be able to: 

• Describe major patterns of health disparities throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States 

• Identify key drivers of COVID-19-related health disparities 

• List three limitations of publicly available COVID-19 datasets for studying health inequities 

• Describe how public health researchers can support a more equitable pandemic response 

Schedule of speakers: 

• 9/24/20: Bonnielin Swenor, Director of the Johns Hopkins Disability Health Research Center and Associate Professor of Ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health 

• 10/1/20: Jarvis Chen, Research Scientist for the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School Of Public Health 

• 10/8/20: Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the UCSF School of Medicine 

• 10/15/20: Tanjala Purnell, Assistant Professor of Cardiovascular Disease and Clinical Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health 

• 10/22/20: Joseph Lewnard, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health; and Max Cuevas, CEO of the Federally Qualified Health Center Clinica de Salud del Valle de Salinas