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This report analyzes the results from a survey of state and territorial health agency staff to collect information regarding health agency efforts to address climate change and extreme weather.

This guide is designed to help leaders prepare for and structure discussions on strategies to mitigate challenges to healthcare capacity during the 2023 fall and winter respiratory illness season.

This toolkit details structure and outcomes of ASTHO’s Vaccine Equity Project to help jurisdictions in their pursuit of vaccine equity.

This brief discusses the difficulty of maintaining compassion and empathy during public health crises, which ultimately leads to a phenomenon called compassion fatigue. 

For many individuals living with disabilities, inaccessible vaccination websites have been a significant barrier to receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. Recent studies have found that many vaccination websites do not reliably meet accessibility ...

An issue brief by ASTHO and the Duke University Margolis Center for Health Policy that highlights considerations for state health officials as they look to maximize the benefits of COVID-19 therapeutics.

As schools work to stay open for in-person learning, it is essential to understand key recommendations related to COVID-19 prevention in K-12 schools. CDC recommends that health department staff work closely with K-12 schools to ...

Each video in this series focuses on a unique topic and features stories from ASTHO’s disability and preparedness specialists in the field. The videos demonstrate how they work to ensure information, testing, and COVID-19 vaccination sites ...

Making Contact: A Training for COVID-19 Case Investigators and Contact Tracers The nation's ability to quickly contain infectious disease outbreaks is more important than ever, and an expanded contact tracing workforce is critical for ...

With many of the state and territorial legislatures reconvening over the next few weeks, we can look forward to new (and not-so-new) legislation start to crop up that will impact public health. To help navigate the new legislative ...

As COVID spread through the country and infection rates rose in every state, many of the the U.S. Affiliated Pacific Islands (USAPI) received media attention for remaining relatively COVID-free. The USAPI’s unified response in the face of ...

As the country prepares for the inauguration of President-Elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr. on Wednesday, the incoming administration has highlighted several priorities over the next four years. This post is a summary of priorities that are ...

When rural hospitals close, it increases the distance people must travel for essential healthcare services. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and magnified the factors leading to rural hospital closures across the country. Many ...

This policy update emphasizes the importance of policymakers choosing to increase funding for public health infrastructure and important initiatives, such as health equity, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2019-2020 flu season had approximately 5 million fewer illnesses than the previous year. Thanks to COVID-19 mitigation efforts like social distancing and increased handwashing—coupled with a higher rate of flu vaccinations among the ...

To enhance social distancing and reduce healthcare worker and patient exposure to COVID-19, there have been unprecedented expansions in the use of telehealth, supported by both federal and state policy.

I think we all welcomed 2021 with open arms as we look to put the worst of 2020 behind us. We have all been through a lot—we have lost family members and friends to COVID-19, we have seen public health officials harassed and maligned, we ...

On May 11, 2023, ASTHO announced it had filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court of North Carolina asserting that a public health official must be empowered to take quick action to protect the public health and safety of their ...

A joint statement on transitioning away from universal case investigation and contact tracing for individual cases of COVID-19 by public health agencies.

On Sept. 3, 2020, Rachel Levine, MD, ASTHO President and Secretary of Health for Pennsylvania, issued a statement of concern and called for rigorous scientific testing in response to comments from federal leadership that implied a COVID-19 ...