Building Community Capacity for Disability Prevention for Minority Elders COVID-19 supplement

PROJECT SUMMARYPrevious studies have shown that major health crises and economic shocks can have negative impacts onmental health, which are worsened when physical quarantine is required. A particularly vulnerable populationare those that have physical and emotional problems and are ethnic/racial and linguistic minority elders, manyof whom live in areas with high infection rates and lack of appropriate health resources. The ongoing impact ofthe crisis on minority elders, who may take longer to recover and require longer periods of quarantine, isessential to understand and address. Our proposed supplement extends from the Positive Minds StrongBodies clinical trial, that showed positive outcomes for this combined mental health and physical disabilitymanagement and prevention intervention. We seek to assess the long-term effect of this program in reducingelders' mortality (Aim 1) and maintaining mental health (Aim 2), as participants have been exposed to COVID-19 or its social effects. We hypothesize that elders who received the intervention approximately 3 years agopre-COVID will have a lower trend for mortality than those in the control condition, after adjusting for age,gender, and comorbidities at baseline. Our study is a unique opportunity to address disparities in a multiethnic,multilingual sample, including Latino, Asian and Black participants in 4 languages, Spanish, Mandarin,Cantonese and English. We propose to test whether the Positive Minds Strong Bodies intervention buffersmental health and disability impacts, through recontact of elders who participated in the 2015-2019 trial, alongwith those that will be newly enrolled in our new implementation study. In the third aim of the supplement, wewill explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on daily stressors for ethnic/racial minority elders, as well astheir responses to public health interventions such as home confinement, social distancing and isolation, massrisk communications, disease testing, intention to vaccinate and contact tracing. The proposed supplement willtest the potential for this combined intervention to contribute to ongoing preparedness during the COVID-19pandemic while also providing an evidence-based program that could support a diverse population in the faceof future health crises.