This Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) highlights the urgent need for social, behavioral, economic, health communication, and epidemiologic research relevant to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and COVID-19. This NOSI encourages urgent competitive supplements and administrative supplements to existing longitudinal studies that address key social and behavioral questions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including adherence to and transmission mitigation from various containment and mitigation efforts; social, behavioral, and economic impacts from these containment and mitigation efforts; and downstream health impacts resulting from these social, behavioral, and economic impacts, including differences in risk and resiliency based on gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and other social determinants of health.

To rapidly improve our understanding of the critical social and behavioral aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, this NOSI encourages submission of applications for urgent competitive revisions or administrative supplements to active grants studying existing longitudinal cohorts, particularly those cohorts with considerable data relevant to COVID-19 social and behavioral factors prior and subsequent to the SAR-CoV-2 outbreak in various locations. These submissions are encouraged to consider four broad areas:

1. Adherence to or transmission reductions from various public health containment and mitigation efforts including but not limited to risk communication, handwashing, disinfecting surfaces, social distancing, self-quarantine, paid sick leave, school closures, and business closures.
2. Economic, social, and personal well-being impacts of these various containment and mitigation actions (e.g., unemployment, social isolation, stress, mental health, substance use, physical activity).
3. The impacts and behavioral responses to misinformation being communicated about COVID-19 and its prevention, treatment and health effects via a range of information channels, including traditional and social media.
4. Downstream health effects from these economic, social, and personal impacts including but not limited to substance use/abuse, mental illness, suicide, stress-related physical disorders, and limitations on healthcare access.

In addressing any of the four areas of interest it will be necessary to examine natural variation in individual, family, social, geographic, and structural levels of response, adherence, stigma, and impact using foreign and domestic opportunities, focusing on specific sectors of the population (including but not limited to gender, age group, socioeconomic status, geographic region, race/ethnicity, urban/rural, sexual orientation, gender identity). Investigators are strongly encouraged to include a range of groups and include medically underserved regions and vulnerable populations (e.g. pregnant women, the homeless, prison populations, people with disabilities, those in shelters or residential treatment settings) to the degree possible given the characteristics of their existing cohorts.

Applications are encouraged to leverage existing cohorts that present opportunities for quasi-experimental designs, natural experiments, interrupted time series analyses, computational and statistical modeling, and AI approaches. Applications that propose only descriptive pre-post associations are strongly discouraged. Findings from proposals submitted under this NOSI should generate more precise modeling parameters that could lead to increased accuracy and actionable predictions of use in this or future epidemics, examine underlying mechanisms of these interventions and their impacts, and/or leverage the staggered implementation of these interventions and their impacts in various locations (cities, counties, states, countries) for natural experiments controlling for appropriate confounds.