Dr. Erica Phillips receives grant in support of COVID-19 research
Dr. Erica Phillips, Co-Director of Community Engagement and Advocacy at the Cornell Center for Health Equity, has received a one-year, $100K Covid-19 research grant from Weill Cornell Medicine.
Phillips, who is also an associate professor of Clinical Medicine at Weill, will use the grant to explore the socio-behavioral risk factors that may have contributed to COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on low-income neighborhoods. Here’s the full description:
“The Contributions of Socio-Behavioral Factors to Disparities in the COVID-19 Pandemic”
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused an outbreak on a scale of global proportion. In New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic, COVID-19 has disproportionately affected low-income neighborhoods and Hispanics and non-Hispanic Blacks. While this may be due to higher rates of underlying illness in these communities, several other factors may also have contributed to differences in COVID-19 exposure. Understanding the role that each of these factors plays, especially those involving socio-behavioral risks, is critical if we are to develop a vaccine program that protects the most vulnerable. This study aims to understand how the social determinants of health, more specifically social cohesion and capital contribute to the unequal distribution of COVID-19 occurrence across NYC. Individuals ages 18 and older who were evaluated for COVID-19 symptoms between March 1 and May 15, 2020, within the NewYork Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medicine (NYP) will be randomly selected as study participants. Data from the electronic medical record system, public data sources, and a survey will be utilized to compare the socio-behavioral, biological and environmental risk factors of participants subsequently hospitalized to those who were not, and to determine the contribution of each to differences in hospitalizations seen between racial/ethnic groups.
