Socioeconomic disparities impact individuals in every area of their lives. The impact of infectious disease is no exception. Addressing the complexities of socioeconomic status, exposure and vulnerability to disease, and health outcomes is crucial for policy makers to design more effective and equitable public health strategies.
CEID members Asma Azizi and Caner Kazanci are authors on a recent paper seeking to address these disparities. In this study, published in Letters in Biomathematics, their methods involved stratifying real-world data from New Orleans, Louisiana based on income levels to represent socioeconomic status, followed by the use of an SIR model to model transmission dynamics within and between these strata. Through optimization, they identified social distancing distributions attempting to balance reduction of overall epidemic size and minimizing infection disparity between socioeconomic groups.
Their findings further highlight the need for tailored public health strategies to address infection inequality. Further integration of socioeconomic factors into epidemiological models will be important in future epidemics to design effective and fair public health strategies that take into account social inequalities and health outcomes.
For more, read the paper here.