After over a year of activity, the Utah Health and Economic Recovery Outreach (HERO) Project wrapped up in fall of 2021, publishing its final project summary on October 28, 2021.
The Utah HERO Project began in May 2020 as a collaborative statewide testing and analysis project to understand the community-based spread of COVID-19. The goal of the HERO Project collected and utilize high-quality local data to inform decision-makers seeking to guide Utah’s residents and economy through a safe return to normalcy.
Throughout the course of the project, nearly 30,000 Utahns living throughout the state and residents of 11 long-term care facilities were tested. Additionally, over 3,500 Utahns were surveyed on attitudes towards vaccines, offering insight on how to increase vaccine uptake.
As a part of its partnership with the CDC to investigate how COVID-19 spreads in schools, the Utah HERO project tested over 3,700 K-12 students and staff. The project found that when students and staff wear masks and employ other mitigation strategies, transmission was low – even at times when community spread was high elsewhere. This data was used by local authorities to inform a safe return to in-person learning.
Utah businesses and consumers were surveyed to create an economic impact analysis, identifying key factors that would lead to economic recovery, shedding an additional light of hope into the great uncertainties of the early chapters of the pandemic. Videos and case studies were published, giving a face to some of Utah’s small business owners, illustrating the great challenges they faced and how the data created by the Utah HERO Project empowered them to keep moving forward.
While the project has come to a close, its legacy and impact still grows. As COVID-19 remains a part of our world and society, the Utah HERO Project’s findings and resources will continue to offer insight for residents, business owners, and policy makers to safely move forward and thrive in a post COVID-19 world.
To access the full archive of published findings, reports, media coverage, etc., including the final project summary, please visit the following link: https://eccles.utah.edu/utah-hero