Let Every Voice Be Heard: Developing a Cost-Effective Community Sampling Frame in Rural Alabama to Combat COVID-19 (poster)

The lack of accurate data on the rural communities’ perspectives of the COVID-19 vaccine impairs the planning, monitoring, and evaluation of vaccine programs. Notably, we do not have adequate data to understand why, although COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted minority populations in these communities, they are reported to be the least likely to be vaccinated. This paper develops a cost-effective community sampling frame based on satellite imagery and machine learning to improve the diversity of data and study the association between household-level visual information and COVID-19 vaccination rates in the Alabama Black Belt. The results provided solid evidence for the hypothesis that high-resolution satellite imagery contains valuable information to understand communities’ perspectives on the COVID-19 vaccine. It also generated extra knowledge and implications for community health to help social workers to develop future vaccine promotion strategies in rural America.