Using Longitudinal Surveillance of Unemployment Claims During Public Health Emergencies to Provide Timely and Granular Data on the Social Determinants of Health

Objective

Employment is a well-documented social determinant of physical and mental health and can be used to determine who is disproportionately affected by public health emergencies. We examined trends in unemployment overall and by gender, by race or ethnic group, and by their interaction for 2 public health emergencies (the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 California wildfires).

Methods

We obtained summary data files on the number of initial unemployment insurance (IUI) claims made in all 58 California counties from January 2018 through December 2021. We fit fixed-effects Poisson regression models to county data on weekly IUI claims cross-classified by gender and race or ethnic group. We used models to evaluate the overall effect of COVID-19, whether this effect changed over time increasing under compounding emergencies, and whether the overall and compounding effects of COVID-19 differed by gender and race or ethnic group.

Results

During the COVID-19 pandemic, weekly IUI claims rates increased to as much as 10 times their prepandemic level. The increase in IUI claims for COVID-19 weeks, compared with weeks from the same month in the 2 years prior, was greater for women than for men of all race or ethnic groups, except for Black women. The higher rates of IUI claims for most women during COVID-19 entailed a reversal of prepandemic gender differences in claims that persisted through 2021.

Conclusion

Public health officials should consider using IUI claims for surveillance of social determinants of health, particularly in the context of emergencies, which we show can have a persisting effect on the social patterning of social determinants. Future research is needed to forecast these affects and inform public health and policy mitigation and prevention strategies.