A Community-Engaged Social Marketing Campaign to Promote Equitable Access to COVID-19 Services Among Latino Immigrants.

To address disparities in COVID-19 outcomes among Latinos with limited English proficiency in Maryland, our team developed a culturally congruent intervention that coupled a statewide social marketing campaign with community-based COVID-19 services. In the first year, we reached 305 122 people through social media advertisements and had 9607 visitors to the Web site. Social marketing campaigns represent an opportunity to promote COVID-19 testing and vaccine uptake among Latino populations, especially when they are paired with community services that simultaneously address structural barriers to care. (Am J Public Health. 2023;113(3):263-266. https://doi.org/10.2105/10.2105/AJPH.2022.307191).

A Crowdsourcing Open Contest to Design a Latino-Specific COVID-19 Campaign: Mixed Methods Analysis.

BACKGROUND: Latino communities are among the most heavily impacted populations by the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States due to intersectional barriers to care. Crowdsourcing open contests can be an effective means of community engagement but have not been well studied in Latino populations nor in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. OBJECTIVE: The aims of this study are to (1) implement and evaluate a crowdsourcing open contest to solicit a name for a COVID-19 social marketing campaign for Latino populations in Maryland and (2) conduct a thematic analysis of submitted entries to guide campaign messaging. METHODS: To assess the level of community engagement in this crowdsourcing open contest, we used descriptive statistics to analyze data on entries, votes, and demographic characteristics of participants. The submitted text was analyzed through inductive thematic analysis. RESULTS: We received 74 entries within a 2-week period. The top 10 entries were chosen by community judges and the winner was decided by popular vote. We received 383 votes within 1 week. The most common themes were collective efficacy, self-efficacy, and perceived benefits of COVID-19 testing. We used these themes to directly inform our social marketing intervention and found that advertisements based on these themes became the highest performing. CONCLUSIONS: Crowdsourcing open contests are an effective means of community engagement and an agile tool for guiding interventions to address COVID-19, including in populations impacted by health care disparities, such as Latino communities. The thematic analysis of contest entries can be a valuable strategy to inform the development of social marketing campaign materials.

Community Testing and SARS-CoV-2 Rates for Latinxs in Baltimore.

INTRODUCTION: Latinxs have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. Latinx immigrants, in particular, face significant barriers to SARS-CoV-2 testing, including lack of insurance, language barriers, stigma, work conflicts, and limited transportation. METHODS: In response to a disproportionately high SARS-CoV-2 positivity rate among Latinxs at the Johns Hopkins Health System, investigators implemented free community-based testing by partnering with religious leaders and leveraging the skill of trusted community health workers. Data were extracted from the electronic health record and a Research Electronic Data Capture database. SARS-CoV-2 positivity was evaluated per event stratified by race/ethnicity. Total rates of SARS-CoV-2 positivity and categorical patient characteristics were compared between groups using chi-square tests. RESULTS: Between June 25, 2020 and October 15, 2020, a total of 1,786 patients (57.5% Latinx, 31.2% non-Hispanic White, 5.9% non-Hispanic Black, and 5.3% non-Hispanic other) were tested for SARS-CoV-2 in 18 testing events. Among them, 355 (19.9%) tested positive. The positivity rate was 31.5% for Latinxs, 7.6% for non-Hispanic Blacks, 3.4% for non-Hispanic Whites, and 5.3% for patients of other races/ethnicities. Compared with Latinxs who tested negative, Latinxs who tested positive were more likely to report Spanish as their preferred language (91.6% vs 81.7%, p<0.001), be younger (30.4 vs 33.4 years, p<0.008), and have a larger household size (4.8 vs 4.3 members, p<0.002). CONCLUSIONS: Community-based testing identified high levels of ongoing SARS-CoV-2 transmission among primarily Latinxs with limited English proficiency. During this period, the overall positivity rate at this community testing site was almost 10 times higher among Latinxs than among non-Hispanic Whites.