(LOB= Legislative Office Building)

The Connecticut General Assembly has announced that they will not meet again before the official end of the 2020 legislative session. It is possible that a special session to consider specific bills will be held before the next legislative session begins in January 2021, but nothing is certain yet.

It has been a busy month for administrative advocacy at Health Equity Solutions:

• On April 2, we sent a letter to Governor Lamont and Department of Public Health Commissioner Renee Coleman-Mitchell asking for the release of race and ethnicity data related to COVID-19. The state is now publishing data on race and ethnicity for COVID-19 cases and deaths. We continue to advocate for more and better quality race and ethnicity data.
• On April 13, we wrote to Department of Social Services Commissioner Deidre Gifford asking that the state’s Medicaid programs employ community health workers to engage in outreach to groups at risk of hardship from social distancing measures and to help newly eligible state residents apply for social services. Outreach and engagement have been a top need cited in our survey and outreach efforts.

The week of April 2, Connecticut celebrated the second annual Health Equity Week. In addition to social media messages shared by our partners, we worked with the UCONN Health Disparities Institute to co-author two op-eds on how the current crisis amplifies longstanding injustices and proposing policy solutions.

We continue to participate in coalitions, state-led workgroups, and conversations with partners and state agency staff to ensure a health equity lens is embedded in COVID-19 response and recovery efforts.

In an effort to ensure that our policy recommendations are community-informed, Health Equity Solutions created a community assessment survey. With the goal of centering health equity in the state’s emergency response, we share the anonymous results with state policymakers on a regular basis. The survey has been sent to Health Equity Solutions’ email lists, disseminated by a number of partners, and shared on social media. HES staff also engages with grassroots partners on a regular basis and adds their input to the summary results. The survey is offered in English and will be available in two other languages soon. It can be taken more than once so that evolving needs can be captured. A summary of the results to date will be on our COVID-19 web page soon and updated regularly.

In order to ensure that all voices are spoken for in our state, please feel free to take the survey and/or share with your networks: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/QN6BN3G  

This month, HES took a deep dive into articles on race, ethnicity, and COVID-19. We discussed three articles: one on the role of bias in testing and diagnosis rates; another on racial disparities in COVID-19 prevalence in CT;  and a third on what causes disparities in COVID-19 impact. While we agreed that the data was not new to any of us, we discussed two key issues in advocating for health equity during this pandemic.

First, we considered who is left out of the COVID-19 data, given the limited nature of testing at this time. While we cannot yet answer this question, we wondered if the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 infection and death would appear even more dramatic if the data were more complete. Our takeaway was that we want our efforts to be cognizant of how much is unknown in the midst of this crisis.

Second, we discussed how health equity is discussed in the media and how we can work to communicate injustice without making comparisons that may be misread to imply that one population is making better choices than another. We know this implication is both untrue and often assumed. This part of our discussion ended in two key takeaways: First, it is often more clear and helpful to cite disproportionate impact than disparities. For example, we can say that Black/African American residents of CT accounted for 15% of COVID-19 related deaths and 10% of the population rather than comparing deaths of people who identify as Black/African American to deaths of people who identify as white. Second, when time and space allow and data for more than one population is being shared, it is helpful to provide context and note that disparities are a symptom of larger structural inequities that create or limit opportunities for different communities in different ways.

Want to help us read more? See our desired list of reading material HERE