| Popis: |
BACKGROUND Healthy Davis Together was a program launched in September 2020 in the City of Davis, California, to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and facilitate the return to normalcy. The program involved multiple interventions, including free saliva-based asymptomatic testing, targeted communication campaigns, education efforts, distribution of personal protective equipment, community partnerships, and investments in the local economy. OBJECTIVE This study identified demographic characteristics of individuals that underwent testing and assessed adherence to testing over time in a community pandemic-response programs launched in a college town in California, USA. METHODS We described overall testing engagement, identified demographic characteristics of program participants, and evaluated changes in testing participation over four different time periods of the COVID-19 pandemic denoted by dominant variant: Pre-Delta (November 18, 2020 to June 13, 2021), Delta (July 1, 2021, to December 14, 2022), Omicron (Omicron BA.1; December 15, 2021, to March 15, 2022) and Post-Omicron (Omicron BA.2, BA.3, BA.4,266 and BA.5; March 16, 2022, to July 1, 2022). RESULTS A total of 770,165 tests were performed between November 18, 2020, and June 30, 2022, among 89,924 residents of Yolo County (41.1% of total population), with significant participation from racially/ethnically diverse participants and across age groups. Most positive cases (49.9% of total) and highest daily participation (895 per 100K population) were during the Omicron period. Among all program participants, 61,363 (68.2%) individuals were tested multiple times. The results show the highest participation rates among women (54.1%), individuals aged 0-18 (25.5%) and 19-34 years (30.6%), and those identifying as white (51.0%). Latinos had a participation rate of 23.9% in the entire program, which remained consistently around 20.7% (SD 2.9) throughout the four periods. CONCLUSIONS The unique features of a pandemic response program that supported community wide access to free asymptomatic testing provide a unique opportunity to evaluate adherence to testing recommendations and testing trends over time. Identification of individual and group-level factors associated with testing behaviors is essential to develop effective and sustainable community-wide mitigation strategies to combat future public health emergencies. |
