A National Neighborhood Data Resource to Understand the Health and Socioeconomic Impacts of the 2020 Pandemic in the United States

The 2020 pandemic resulted in substantial changes to American neighborhoods in ways that are only beginning to be elucidated. A burgeoning body of research has tried to understand the forces driving these trends, focusing on the distribution of disease at the individual level or economic models at the business level. What is not considered is the context in which these changes are taking place. By context, we mean the neighborhood community environment that holds the opportunities, restrictions, risks, and flexibility for post-pandemic growth, including comprehensive broadband internet access to facilitate telemedicine, online schooling, remote work, and online grocery shopping; parks and walkable streets to facilitate physical activity and social interaction to mitigate isolation; and the provision of medical care through the availability of alternate health care providers and pharmacies. Access to these neighborhood resources differs across America, reinforcing risk for older adults, children and adolescents, and those in rural areas. However, a lack of national, standardized, longitudinal metrics of the local neighborhood environment has hindered the ability to identify which communities are most affected by the immediate and longer-term consequences of the pandemic for a host of behavioral, psychological, and socioeconomic outcomes. To address this limitation in the nation’s data infrastructure, we will augment, curate and disseminate data from our National Neighborhood Data Archive (NaNDA), which includes a wealth of physical, and socioeconomic characteristics of the local neighborhood across the United States (e.g., business density, broadband internet access, and healthcare availability), in the years both before and since the pandemic. We will participate with the SBECCC Consortium to integrate, share, and analyze spatially referenced neighborhood data that can be readily linked to existing survey data, cohort studies, or electronic health records at various levels of geography. We will work with the Consortium Coordination Center to identify and create key neighborhood metrics that are priorities for research teams in the Consortium, including a set of common data elements (CDEs) on socioeconomic I indicators at the neighborhood level. We will also develop new metrics of longitudinal neighborhood change in the decades preceding the pandemic, which can inform community risk and resilience.