Evaluating Effects of Social Inequalities on the COVID-19 Pandemic in a Low- and Middle-Income Country (LMIC)

Maria Yury Ichihara and colleagues at the Centre for Data and Knowledge Integration for Health (Cidacs) at Fiocruz in Brazil will create a social disparities index to measure inequalities relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as unequal access to healthcare, to identify regions that are more vulnerable to infection and to better focus prevention efforts. In Brazil, markers of inequality are associated with COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. They will develop the index of available COVID-19 surveillance data, hosted on the Cidacs platform, and build a public data visualization dashboard to share the index and patterns of COVID-19 incidence and mortality with the broader community. This will enable health managers and policymakers to monitor the pandemic situation in the most vulnerable populations and target social and health interventions.