The US COVID-19 County Policy Database: A novel resource to support pandemic-related research

It is increasingly recognized that policies have played a role in both alleviating and exacerbating the health and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. While prior work has focused on characterizing and analyzing the effects of federal and state policies, there has been limited systematic evaluation of variation in U.S. local (i.e., county) COVID-19-related policies. This study introduces the U.S. COVID-19 County Policy (UCCP) Database, whose objective is to systematically gather, characterize, and assess variation in U.S. county-level COVID-19-related policies. Data collection is still ongoing for this NIH- and PCORI-funded database and Dr. Hamad will describe the data collection methods and some preliminary results.
Bio: Dr. Rita Hamad is a social epidemiologist and family physician in the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies and the Department of Family & Community Medicine at UCSF. She is the director of the Social Policies for Health Equity Research Program (sphere.ucsf.edu). Her research focuses on the pathways linking social factors like poverty and education with racial and socioeconomic disparities in health across the life course. In particular, she studies the health effects of social and economic policies using interdisciplinary quasi-experimental methods to generate actionable evidence to inform policymaking. Dr. Hamad is the Associate Director of the UCSF Center for Health Equity. She is also a member of the steering committee of the UCSF Population Health Data Initiative, serving as the Faculty Lead for the development of data infrastructure to advance population health research on campus. Outside of UCSF, she is the co-Chair of the Communications Committee of the Interdisciplinary Association of Population Health Sciences and was a Fellow at the National Academy of Medicine during 2020-2022.