Faculty Publications
Document Type
Article
Keywords
COVID-19, Epidemiology, Indices of health and disease and standardisation of rates
Journal/Book/Conference Title
BMJ Global Health
Volume
8
Issue
6
Abstract
The discourse on vulnerability to COVID-19 or any other pandemic is about the susceptibility to the effects of disease outbreaks. Over time, vulnerability has been assessed through various indices calculated using a confluence of societal factors. However, categorising Arctic communities, without considering their socioeconomic, cultural and demographic uniqueness, into the high and low continuum of vulnerability using universal indicators will undoubtedly result in the underestimation of the communities' capacity to withstand and recover from pandemic exposure. By recognising vulnerability and resilience as two separate but interrelated dimensions, this study reviews the Arctic communities' ability to cope with pandemic risks. In particular, we have developed a pandemic vulnerability-resilience framework for Alaska to examine the potential community-level risks of COVID-19 or future pandemics. Based on the combined assessment of the vulnerability and resilience indices, we found that not all highly vulnerable census areas and boroughs had experienced COVID-19 epidemiological outcomes with similar severity. The more resilient a census area or borough is, the lower the cumulative death per 100 000 and case fatality ratio in that area. The insight that pandemic risks are the result of the interaction between vulnerability and resilience could help public officials and concerned parties to accurately identify the populations and communities at most risk or with the greatest need, which, in turn, helps in the efficient allocation of resources and services before, during and after a pandemic. A resilience-vulnerability-focused approach described in this paper can be applied to assess the potential effect of COVID-19 and similar future health crises in remote regions or regions with large Indigenous populations in other parts of the world.
Department
Department of Geography
Department
GeoTree Center
Original Publication Date
6-7-2023
Object Description
1 PDF File
DOI of published version
10.1136/bmjgh-2022-011646
Repository
UNI ScholarWorks, Rod Library, University of Northern Iowa
Copyright
©2023 The Author(s) CC BY-NC License
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Tiwari, Sweta; Petrov, Andrey; Mateshvili, Nino; Devlin, Michele; Golosov, Nikolay; Rozanova-Smith, Marya; Welford, Mark; Degroote, John; Degai, Tatiana; and Ksenofontov, Stanislav, "Incorporating Resilience When Assessing Pandemic Risk In The Arctic: A Case Study Of Alaska" (2023). Faculty Publications. 5418.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/facpub/5418
Comments
First publilshed in BMJ Global Health v.8 i.6 (2023) by BMJ Journals. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2022-011646