Communication for Awareness and Action on Inequitable Impacts of COVID-19 on Latinos

Abstract

In response to coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in 2020, the national Salud America! Latino health equity program at University of Texas Health San Antonio applied its digital content curation model to create and communicate culturally relevant news, stories, and data to raise immediate awareness and generate action against the pandemic’s inequitable impacts on U.S. Latinos. Digital content curation is an emerging public health communication strategy using a systematic, refined process to create tailored online and social health messages and prevent mixed messaging and information overload for an audience. Salud America! curated culturally relevant digital content to raise awareness of the pandemic’s inequitable impact on Latinos and promote solutions for health equity, with a unique combination of website blog posts exploring pandemic effects on Latinos, peer-modeled stories of people responding meaningfully to the crisis, podcast episodes and Tweetchats engaging people in COVID-19 solutions for Latinos, action tools and campaigns equipping school leaders to make grassroots changes, and supplying advocates with a local data tool on health equity identification. The digital health promotion intervention produced curated content that spiked program website traffic to record highs, revealing the model’s effectiveness in increasing exposure to culturally relevant and action-oriented information for a novel topic.