Practice Title: Environmental Health COVID-19 Recovery Program to Improve Ventilation & Indoor Air Quality
Department: Public Health - Seattle and King County
Size: Large (Population of 500,000+ people)
State: Washington
Summary of Practice:
Public Health – Seattle & King County is the largest local health department in Washington State, serving a population of nearly 2.2 million people with over 100 languages spoken. Environmental Health Services (EHS) Division aims to center equity and community partnerships in our work to prevent disease and promote healthy communities throughout King County.
As the unexpected surge from the Delta variant began to emerge this year, we pivoted and adapted by quickly restructuring our prior emergency response programs into a unified recovery effort, focused on improving ventilation and indoor air quality (IAQ) – a key environmental health intervention strategy for COVID-19.
To support the safe reopening of the economy, we targeted areas and sectors most in need and with the highest COVID-19 transmission risk, offered direct one-on-one technical assistance (TA), partnered with BIPOC-led community-based organizations (CBOs), collaborated with stakeholder agencies, created multilingual educational materials, and distributed air cleaner supplies (HEPAs and box fan filter (BFF) kits). We planned and implemented these simultaneously, while continuously improving our processes to lower community barriers to our services and supplies.
This year, we expanded our reach to more sectors: small restaurants, other small businesses or community organizations, childcares and preschools, K-12 schools, faith organizations, and congregate settings. These included sites with COVID-19 outbreaks. To prioritize the free HEPAs and BFF kits, we used a tiered approach to first serve those in South Seattle, South King County and Southeast King County – areas with a disproportionate burden of COVID-19 incidence, lower vaccination rates, and/or other health and social inequities.
From June to December 2021, we accomplished the following towards reducing COVID-19 related health inequities:
· Completed 525 technical assistance (phone consultations/site visits), including assisting 37 outbreak sites
· Created 8 educational materials with translations into at most 12 languages
· Organized 6 webinars with about 200 total participants
· Launched 1 communications and social media campaign
· Distributed a total 951 HEPAs to eligible recipients (70% of whom are in the Tier 1 top priority group)
· Delivered 1464 HEPAs to our CBO partners for further distribution to childcare sites
· Distributing over 530 BFF kits to individual households
· Received over 200 referrals of small businesses or organizations from our CBO partners
· Delivered 240 HEPAs to a high priority school district for placement in high-risk areas (e.g., isolation rooms, health rooms, cafeterias, special needs rooms, and music rooms)
· Surveyed King County schools to determine needs around ventilation improvements during COVID-19, with plans to distribute up to 1500 HEPA units to schools
· Designed a study with the University of Washington to evaluate the effectiveness of HEPA air cleaners in congregate shelters and learn how they can be most effectively deployed in different situations
We are using this recovery effort to learn more about community needs, barriers, and priorities related to ventilation and indoor air quality. It is already informing development and stakeholder-relationship building for a new long-term School Safety and Health Equity Program to be created in our EHS Division.
Environmental Health COVID-19 Recovery Program to Improve Ventilation & Indoor Air Quality
Category
Environmental Public Health