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Resident Willingness to Participate in Digital Contact Tracing in a COVID-19 Hotspot: Findings From a Detroit Panel Study

BACKGROUND: Digital surveillance tools and health informatics show promise in counteracting diseases but have limited uptake. A notable illustration of the limits of such tools is the general failure of digital contact tracing in the United States in response to COVID-19. OBJECTIVE: We investigated...

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Autores principales: Wileden, Lydia, Anthony, Denise, Campos-Castillo, Celeste, Morenoff, Jeffrey
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: JMIR Publications 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9855617/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36240029
http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/39002
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author Wileden, Lydia
Anthony, Denise
Campos-Castillo, Celeste
Morenoff, Jeffrey
author_facet Wileden, Lydia
Anthony, Denise
Campos-Castillo, Celeste
Morenoff, Jeffrey
author_sort Wileden, Lydia
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Digital surveillance tools and health informatics show promise in counteracting diseases but have limited uptake. A notable illustration of the limits of such tools is the general failure of digital contact tracing in the United States in response to COVID-19. OBJECTIVE: We investigated the associations between individual characteristics and the willingness to use app-based contact tracing in Detroit, a majority-minority city that experienced multiple waves of COVID-19 outbreaks and deaths since the start of the pandemic. The aim of this study was to examine variations among residents in the willingness to download a contact tracing app on their phones to provide public health officials with information about close COVID-19 contact during summer 2020. METHODS: To examine residents’ willingness to participate in digital contact tracing, we analyzed data from 2 waves of the Detroit Metro Area Communities Study, a population-based survey of Detroit, Michigan residents. The data captured 1873 responses from 991 Detroit residents collected in June and July 2020. We estimated a series of multilevel logit models to gain insights into differences in the willingness to participate in digital contact tracing across a variety of individual attributes, including race/ethnicity, degree of trust in the government, and level of education, as well as interactions among these variables. RESULTS: Our results reflected widespread reluctance to participate in digital contact tracing in response to COVID-19, as less than half (826/1873, 44.1%) of the respondents said they would be willing to participate in app-based contact tracing. Compared to White respondents, Black (odds ratio [OR] 0.45, 95% CI 0.23-0.86) and Latino (OR 0.32, 95% CI 0.11-0.99) respondents were significantly less willing to participate in digital contact tracing. Trust in the government was positively associated with the willingness to participate in digital contact tracing (OR 1.17, 95% CI 1.07-1.27), but this effect was the strongest for White residents (OR 2.14, 95% CI 1.55-2.93). We found similarly divergent patterns of the effects of education by race. While there were no significant differences among noncollege-educated residents, White college-educated residents showed greater willingness to use app-based contact tracing (OR 6.12, 95% CI 1.86-20.15) and Black college-educated residents showed less willingness (OR 0.46, 95% CI 0.26-0.81). CONCLUSIONS: Trust in the government and education contribute to Detroit residents’ wariness of digital contact tracing, reflecting concerns about surveillance that cut across race but likely arise from different sources. These findings point to the importance of a culturally informed understanding of health hesitancy for future efforts hoping to leverage digital contact tracing. Though contact tracing technologies have the potential to advance public health, unequal uptake may exacerbate disparate impacts of health crises.
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spelling pubmed-98556172023-01-21 Resident Willingness to Participate in Digital Contact Tracing in a COVID-19 Hotspot: Findings From a Detroit Panel Study Wileden, Lydia Anthony, Denise Campos-Castillo, Celeste Morenoff, Jeffrey JMIR Public Health Surveill Original Paper BACKGROUND: Digital surveillance tools and health informatics show promise in counteracting diseases but have limited uptake. A notable illustration of the limits of such tools is the general failure of digital contact tracing in the United States in response to COVID-19. OBJECTIVE: We investigated the associations between individual characteristics and the willingness to use app-based contact tracing in Detroit, a majority-minority city that experienced multiple waves of COVID-19 outbreaks and deaths since the start of the pandemic. The aim of this study was to examine variations among residents in the willingness to download a contact tracing app on their phones to provide public health officials with information about close COVID-19 contact during summer 2020. METHODS: To examine residents’ willingness to participate in digital contact tracing, we analyzed data from 2 waves of the Detroit Metro Area Communities Study, a population-based survey of Detroit, Michigan residents. The data captured 1873 responses from 991 Detroit residents collected in June and July 2020. We estimated a series of multilevel logit models to gain insights into differences in the willingness to participate in digital contact tracing across a variety of individual attributes, including race/ethnicity, degree of trust in the government, and level of education, as well as interactions among these variables. RESULTS: Our results reflected widespread reluctance to participate in digital contact tracing in response to COVID-19, as less than half (826/1873, 44.1%) of the respondents said they would be willing to participate in app-based contact tracing. Compared to White respondents, Black (odds ratio [OR] 0.45, 95% CI 0.23-0.86) and Latino (OR 0.32, 95% CI 0.11-0.99) respondents were significantly less willing to participate in digital contact tracing. Trust in the government was positively associated with the willingness to participate in digital contact tracing (OR 1.17, 95% CI 1.07-1.27), but this effect was the strongest for White residents (OR 2.14, 95% CI 1.55-2.93). We found similarly divergent patterns of the effects of education by race. While there were no significant differences among noncollege-educated residents, White college-educated residents showed greater willingness to use app-based contact tracing (OR 6.12, 95% CI 1.86-20.15) and Black college-educated residents showed less willingness (OR 0.46, 95% CI 0.26-0.81). CONCLUSIONS: Trust in the government and education contribute to Detroit residents’ wariness of digital contact tracing, reflecting concerns about surveillance that cut across race but likely arise from different sources. These findings point to the importance of a culturally informed understanding of health hesitancy for future efforts hoping to leverage digital contact tracing. Though contact tracing technologies have the potential to advance public health, unequal uptake may exacerbate disparate impacts of health crises. JMIR Publications 2023-01-19 /pmc/articles/PMC9855617/ /pubmed/36240029 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/39002 Text en ©Lydia Wileden, Denise Anthony, Celeste Campos-Castillo, Jeffrey Morenoff. Originally published in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance (https://publichealth.jmir.org), 19.01.2023. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on https://publichealth.jmir.org, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.
spellingShingle Original Paper
Wileden, Lydia
Anthony, Denise
Campos-Castillo, Celeste
Morenoff, Jeffrey
Resident Willingness to Participate in Digital Contact Tracing in a COVID-19 Hotspot: Findings From a Detroit Panel Study
title Resident Willingness to Participate in Digital Contact Tracing in a COVID-19 Hotspot: Findings From a Detroit Panel Study
title_full Resident Willingness to Participate in Digital Contact Tracing in a COVID-19 Hotspot: Findings From a Detroit Panel Study
title_fullStr Resident Willingness to Participate in Digital Contact Tracing in a COVID-19 Hotspot: Findings From a Detroit Panel Study
title_full_unstemmed Resident Willingness to Participate in Digital Contact Tracing in a COVID-19 Hotspot: Findings From a Detroit Panel Study
title_short Resident Willingness to Participate in Digital Contact Tracing in a COVID-19 Hotspot: Findings From a Detroit Panel Study
title_sort resident willingness to participate in digital contact tracing in a covid-19 hotspot: findings from a detroit panel study
topic Original Paper
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9855617/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36240029
http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/39002
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