COVID-19 vaccination may be off to a slow start, but soon supply levels will rise and processes will be streamlined. Thoughtfully designed outreach with well-crafted messages will be of the utmost importance to ensure enough people are vaccinated to put us on the path to population immunity and long-term protection from the disease. As decision-makers plan and implement vaccination campaigns, understanding the COVID-19 relative mortality risks and potential barriers to vaccine uptake by ZIP code will be valuable in building effective communication and outreach plans in each community.
With this in mind, leaders of the UW Neighborhood Health Partnerships Program (NHP) partnered with the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ) and researchers at the UW Health Innovation Program (HIP) to develop a tool that will help community-level decision makers prioritize their COVID-19 vaccination outreach in Wisconsin communities. The tool, available at https://nhp.wisc.edu/covid-19/, estimates the relative risk of COVID-19 mortality and potential barriers to COVID-19 vaccination in many Wisconsin ZIP codes.