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Latin America has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic but estimations of rates of infections are very limited and lack the level of detail required to guide policy decisions. We implemented a COVID-19 sentinel surveillance study with 59,770 RT-PCR tests on mostly asymptomatic individuals and combine this data with administrative records on all detected cases to capture the spread and dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic in Bogota from June 2020 to early March 2021. We describe various features of the pandemic that appear to be specific to a middle income countries. We find that, by March 2021, slightly more than half of the population in Bogota has been infected, despite only a small fraction of this population being detected. The initial buildup of immunity contributed to the containment of the pandemic in the first and second waves. We also show that the share of the population infected by March 2021 varies widely by occupation, socio-economic stratum, and location. This, in turn, has affected the dynamics of the spread with different groups being infected in the two waves.

Local pollution exposures disproportionately impact minority households, but the root causes remain unclear. This study conducts a correspondence experiment on a major online housing platform to test whether housing discrimination constrains minority access to housing options in markets with significant sources of airborne chemical toxics. We find that renters with African American or Hispanic/LatinX names are 41% less likely than renters with White names to receive responses for properties in low-exposure locations. We find no evidence of discriminatory constraints in high-exposure locations, indicating that discrimination increases relative access to housing choices at elevated exposure risk.

, for helpful comments and feedback. Yifang Zhang provided excellent research assistance. Data and replication files available at: https://github.com/uiuc-bdeep/Unlocking-Amenities. All errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.