Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: May 7, 2023
Date Accepted: Feb 26, 2024
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Characteristics and Testing Trends: A COVID-19 Community Response Program
ABSTRACT
Background:
Healthy Davis Together was a program launched in September 2020 in the City of Davis, California, to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and facilitate the return to normalcy. The program involved multiple interventions, including free saliva-based asymptomatic testing, targeted communication campaigns, education efforts, distribution of personal protective equipment, community partnerships, and investments in the local economy.
Objective:
This study identified demographic characteristics of individuals that underwent testing and assessed adherence to testing over time in a community pandemic-response programs launched in a college town in California, USA.
Methods:
We described overall testing engagement, identified demographic characteristics of program participants, and evaluated changes in testing participation over four different time periods of the COVID-19 pandemic denoted by dominant variant: Pre-Delta (November 18, 2020 to June 13, 2021), Delta (July 1, 2021, to December 14, 2022), Omicron (Omicron BA.1; December 15, 2021, to March 15, 2022) and Post-Omicron (Omicron BA.2, BA.3, BA.4,266 and BA.5; March 16, 2022, to July 1, 2022).
Results:
A total of 770,165 tests were performed between November 18, 2020, and June 30, 2022, among 89,924 residents of Yolo County (41.1% of total population), with significant participation from racially/ethnically diverse participants and across age groups. Most positive cases (49.9% of total) and highest daily participation (895 per 100K population) were during the Omicron period. Among all program participants, 61,363 (68.2%) individuals were tested multiple times. The results show the highest participation rates among women (54.1%), individuals aged 0-18 (25.5%) and 19-34 years (30.6%), and those identifying as white (51.0%). Latinos had a participation rate of 23.9% in the entire program, which remained consistently around 20.7% (SD 2.9) throughout the four periods.
Conclusions:
The unique features of a pandemic response program that supported community wide access to free asymptomatic testing provide a unique opportunity to evaluate adherence to testing recommendations and testing trends over time. Identification of individual and group-level factors associated with testing behaviors is essential to develop effective and sustainable community-wide mitigation strategies to combat future public health emergencies.
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Copyright
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