Study Explores Effects of COVID-19 on Black and Latino People Living with HIV

February 22, 2021

With the COVID-19 pandemic taking a disproportionate toll on low-income people of color, a research team led by Marya Gwadz of New York University’s Silver School of Social Work set out to understand the ways in which The pandemic may put people at risk of Adverse outcomes and the ways they adapted and successfully coped with the emerging pandemic, focused on people of low socioeconomic status who have lived with HIV for a decade or more.

The team’s recently published study explores the effects of COVID-19 on HIV care participation, HIV drug use, and general well-being during the early stages of the pandemic through a structured assessment of 100 black people. and low-income Latinas who have been living with HIV for 17 years on average. In-depth interviews were conducted with 26 of these long-term HIV survivors.

Lead author Marya Gwadz is a professor and associate dean of research at the Silver School of Social Work and head of the Intervention Innovations Team Lab (ITT-Lab), which conducted this research, and is also an associate director of Transdisciplinary Research. Methods Core at the Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (CDUHR) at the NYU School of Global Public Health.

The study was published online by Springer. Nature.

We were interested in risks, but also in identifying ‘indigenous coping strategies’ and gaps that could be addressed for better future preparedness in times of crisis. We define these as effective ways of managing health and wellness in the COVID-19 era that emerge from the community, but they are not necessarily strategies that researchers or experts would have devised. “

Marya Gwadz, Lead Study Author, Professor, Associate Dean of Research, Silver School of Social Work, Intervention Innovation Team Lab Director

Among the findings:

• Participants were the first to adopt the public health recommendations related to COVID, such as social distancing, and were also sophisticated in their approach to collecting and interpreting public health information from various sources. Trust in local sources of information was greater than trust in various federal sources.
• Their experiences and knowledge gained from the HIV pandemic and living in poverty were often applied to the management of COVID-19. For example, participants knew how to “rush” to obtain food and other resources, and they often shared these resources with others in their community. However, the need to hurry, rather than being able to stay home, put them at a higher risk of exposure to COVID-19.
• HIV care visits were commonly canceled as a result of risk factors for the COVID-19 pandemic, such as inadequate access to some forms of telehealth and food insecurity, “but, in general, participation in health care. HIV and antiretroviral therapy use is not seriously disturbed. ” Similarly, substance use treatment appointments and supports, including 12-step meetings, were initially canceled and eventually switched to a virtual platform, although not all participants were able to access these services.
• Most had cell phone or Internet service (but not both) through the “Obama Phone” program (that is, the Federal Lifeline Assistance program) and generally did not have the equipment, access, or technical skills to keep appointments. telehealth. The Federal Lifeline Assistance program needs to be improved and technical training and support provided to prevent this same problem from emerging in future crises.
• The early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic coincided with the resurgence of the racial justice movement. Participants drew a direct line between structural racism and the disproportionate adverse effects of COVID-19 in communities of color, and similar racial / ethnic disparities in HIV prevalence and morbidity and mortality associated with the HIV pandemic.

The study also examines the implications for preparing for future crises, including how the National AIDS / AIDS Strategy can serve as a model to prevent COVID-19 from becoming “another pandemic of the poor.”