Throughout the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, rates of COVID-19 have been persistently high in San Diego County's central and southern communities near the United States/Mexico border. These regions predominantly house Latino residents, the ethnic minority community most impacted by COVID-19 in San Diego. In the Phase I project, University of California, San Diego (UCSD) partnered with San Ysidro Health (SYH) and the Global Action Research Center, to co-create and demonstrate the impact of a COVID-19 testing program in San Ysidro, one of the most impacted areas from COVID-19 in San Diego County. To date, the project tested >10,000 community members (92% Latino) and received requests to scale-out the testing program to additional primary care clinic sites.
In this Phase III project, Community-engaged Optimization of COVID-19 Rapid Evaluation And TEsting Experiences (CO-CREATE-Ex) will extend work with the Phase I community and clinical partners to refine, specify, implement, and evaluate an implementation strategy bundle that optimizes COVID-19 testing, expanding beyond current polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing to FDA-authorized COVID-19 rapid antigen testing.
CO-CREATE-Ex: Community-engaged Optimization of COVID-19 Rapid Evaluation and TEsting Experiences
CO-CREATE-Ex will roll-out our implementation using 3 strategies:
- keeping the current, walk-up free testing protocol
- Offering Community Health Worker (CHW) to lead COVID-19 test counseling, preventive care reminders, and offer testing support
- Installing vending machines that will dispense FDA-authorized self-testing kits.
For each strategy, participants will consent into study, provide demographics and test history, and receive a free rapid antigen test (RAT) kit. After receiving the test kit, participants will be prompted to return their results and fill out a survey about their COVID-19 experiences. Study subjects will be contacted up to three times over a course of 4 weeks to return their results and complete the survey. Study coordinators will use participants' preferred method of contact.
