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| By Leila Yazdani : America has an inequality problem and the Coronavirus crisis is making it worse. But, new data from the last few days reveals just how devastating the Covid-19 crisis has been for people of color. Coronavirus pandemic is killing black and Latino Americans at disproportionately high rates.
The Coronavirus can infect anybody but African Americans are dying in disproportionate numbers, especially in certain big cities, so that a public health expert says African Americans are at greater risk of death from Coronavirus. Why are African American communities at added risk for the Coronavirus?
Being black in the US can be bad for health. “When whites catch a cold, black folks get pneumonia.” That’s a folk saying in the black community that reflects a historical pattern: Whenever a disease afflicts America, it hits black America even harder.
Black New Yorkers are dying at twice the rate of their white peers; Latinos in the city are also succumbing to the virus at a much higher rate than white or Asian New Yorkers. The same trends can be seen in infection and hospitalization rates, too.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new, preliminary nationwide data, that revealed 30 percent of Covid-19 patients are African American, even though African Americans make up around 13 percent of the population of the United States, Vox reported.
These initial data provide a still-incomplete picture of the national outbreak’s disparities. And the picture keeps looking worse by the day. Moreover, a Washington Post analysis found that majority-black counties had infection rates three times the rate of majority-white counties.
Inequity in access to health care and economic opportunity
Underlying health issues and limited access to treatment also partly explain why so many Coronavirus victims are black. Blacks are statistically more likely to live in poverty, with less access to health insurance. And more are mistrustful of health care providers, CNN mentioned. In fact, black people are not to blame for racial disparities. Racism is to blame.
For many public health experts, the reasons behind the disparities are not difficult to explain, the result of longstanding structural inequalities. At a time when the authorities have advocated staying home as the best way to avoid the virus, black Americans disproportionately belong to part of the work force that does not have the luxury of working from home, experts said. That places them at high risk for contracting the highly infectious disease in transit or at work, NY Times told.
Longstanding inequalities also make African-Americans less likely to be insured, and more likely to have existing health conditions and face racial bias that prevents them from getting proper treatment. “It’s America’s unfinished business — we’re free, but not equal,” civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson told the AP. “There’s a reality check that has been brought by the Coronavirus, that exposes the weakness and the opportunity.” The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., is calling for the creation of a new Kerner Commission to document the “racism and discrimination built into public policies” that make the pandemic measurably worse for some African-Americans.
False rumors: black people were immune to the disease
“An information vacuum in some black communities … allowed false rumors to fester that black people were immune to the disease,” the New York Times reported. The Los Angeles activist Najee Ali told the Los Angeles Times, “That myth spread like wildfire on social media, but there was never a concentrated effort from leaders to dispel that myth.” That many Americans generalized the behavior of black individuals, claiming black people are being infected and killed by COVID-19 at higher rates because they are not taking the threat seriously or social distancing appropriately, should not be surprising.
But the evidence points in the opposite direction. A national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center between March 10 and 16, long before racial disparities in infection rates were documented, found that black respondents, at 46 percent, were more than twice as likely as white respondents, at 21 percent, to view the Coronavirus as a major threat to their own health, according to The Atlantic.
Days later, Pew and Dynata conducted a survey that again found that black people (59 percent) were significantly more likely than white people (44 percent) to be very concerned about their health during this pandemic. According to the survey, black people were more likely than white people to be buying nonperishable foods, hand sanitizer, cleaning products, toilet paper, and bottled water. Ironically, the very people calling black people ignorant are ignorant about black people.
Basic tenets of communicating to the public have been ignored by Trump
One important way to allay such fears is through communication about the Coronavirus that is tailored to minority and non-English speaking populations and delivered by credible messengers. With the pandemic disproportionately ravaging black and Hispanic populations, the need has become acute, lawmakers and public health experts warn. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-Fla.) said Latino and black residents in her heavily minority South Florida district aren’t getting information they need to understand the pandemic and the steps they need to take to protect themselves.
“They still don’t completely understand what the symptoms of Covid are. They still have questions as to how it’s transmitted,” she said. Basic tenets of communicating to the public during a pandemic — like articulating empathy and maintaining consistent messaging from government officials — have been ignored by the Trump’s administration during the Coronavirus outbreak, dozens of public health professionals have told Politico in recent weeks. The effect of those missteps has been exacerbated in minority communities that were already distrustful due to long-running racial inequities in the health care system, they said. The Covid-19 racial disparity in infections and deaths is viewed as the latest chapter of historical injustices, generational poverty and a flawed health care system.
