As planning and quality assurance manager at Pinellas County Government’s Department of Health and Human Services, Reed works to ensure quality outcomes for all the services and contracts the county provides in the community.
Reed discussed the “COVID Tracker,” a dashboard she created for looking at county data in relation to race and health equity.
Reed shared that the data coming down from the state and county level are showing great proportions of COVID-19, but also believed there was a need to look deeper.
When Lavender asked how data could impact the course of COVID-19 rates in black and brown communities, Reed responded, “We shouldn’t wait for [increased negative outcomes] to happen; we should be mobilizing ourselves to test those communities to make sure that we don’t have a disproportionate impact.”
Dutton reaffirmed the importance of Reed’s use of rates to track the racial data, rather than the proportional numbers used by the state of Florida, and referred to Reed’s writing on the case for analysis of rates by race.
