From The University of Pittsburgh School of Law:
Racial disparities in the pandemic
It didn’t take long. Only weeks into the shutdown, forecasts began to emerge that COVID19 would disproportionately affect Black communities. Dr. Uché Blackstock, a health equity expert, was sounding the alarm by late March 2020.
1 Soon after, reports of excess morbidity—to use the sterile language of epidemiology—were followed by reports of excess mortality among Black people. Put plainly, more Black people than white people were getting sick and dying of
COVID-19.
Reports came from far and wide. At first it was the big cities. In Milwaukee, data reported in early April showed Black people making up nearly half of the coronavirus infections and 81% of deaths, even though they made up only 26% of the population.2 A few days later, a report from Chicago shared that 70% of its deaths were of Black residents, though only 29% of the city’s living residents were Black.3 Nor were Southern cities immune. In New Orleans, which celebrated
Mardi Gras just as the virus was gaining a foothold, deaths in the predominantly Black Orleans Parish accounted for 40% of the deaths in the entire state of Louisiana. We also started hearing about “super spreader” events in Black communities in smaller locales. A funeral in Albany,Georgia left the midsize city’s sole hospital overwhelmed by patients suffering from an illness that
its doctors had never seen before.4
The story line that emerged early in the pandemic has persisted: COVID-19 has been
hitting Black and brown Americans especially hard. The steady drumbeat of reporting about those racial disparities grew numbing. But for folks familiar with the pervasiveness and persistence of racial health disparities prior to the pandemic, the reports were not surprising. Dr. Camara Jones, a family physician and former president of the American Public Health Association, reflected:
“COVID is just unmasking the deep disinvestment in our communities, the historical injustices and the impact of residential segregation.” 5 The predictability of the disparities did not detract from their devastating impact.6 Continue reading >>>
|
|
|
|
