Increasing COVID-19 Safety and Awareness for Ethnically Diverse Communities: Exploring Media Preferences and Messaging Effectiveness.

Abstract

With the goal of achieving herd immunity for residents of an ethnically diverse metropolitan area in the Mid-Atlantic region, a tiered public health intervention was formulated to deploy available COVID-19 vaccines to residents. The three key functions for the intervention program were Messaging & Monitoring, Deployment & Directing, and Acquisition & Availability, all of which were systematically applied to the process of limiting the novel coronavirus' spread and immunizing residents. This evaluation study was conducted to provide timely and actionable data for municipal leaders concerning the effectiveness of messaging for community outreach. Findings from this mixed-methods research revealed differences among population subgroups relative to how COVID-19 information was obtained. Particularly salient were the statistical tests performed on index scores that were generated from a cross-sectional altitude survey. Differences were found in perceptions of ethnic subgroups about the effectiveness of public service memes for promoting COVID-19 safety and vaccinations.