It is rare that any problem in the USA will not possess a racial dimension. It is a legacy of the discrimination and inequality that goes back generations.
In this COVID-19 pandemic African Americans are dying in disproportionate numbers, especially in certain big cities. The disparity is especially stark in cities like New Orleans, Chicago and Detroit, where high concentrations of African Americans live. Critics note that those risks are significantly exacerbated by racial inequities in healthcare, including facility closures and caps on public health insurance plans like Medicaid and Medicare. African Americans are twice as likely to lack health insurance compared with their white counterparts, and more likely to live in medically underserved areas, where primary care is sparse or expensive.
New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo once called the coronavirus a “great equalizer”, yet the data shows the coronavirus has been anything but indiscriminate.
“We know that black Americans are particularly vulnerable. This is a social, economic and racial justice issue,” Kristen Clarke of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights said. “How one community is treated impacts all communities across the country.”
Governor JB Pritkzer of Illinois acknowledged racism’s role in the state’s response to the outbreak, but he called it “a much broader problem” that won’t be solved in a matter of weeks. “It’s hard to make up for decades, maybe centuries, of inequality of application of healthcare to people of color,” he said.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/black-americans-coronavirus-us-south-data
In this COVID-19 pandemic African Americans are dying in disproportionate numbers, especially in certain big cities. The disparity is especially stark in cities like New Orleans, Chicago and Detroit, where high concentrations of African Americans live. Critics note that those risks are significantly exacerbated by racial inequities in healthcare, including facility closures and caps on public health insurance plans like Medicaid and Medicare. African Americans are twice as likely to lack health insurance compared with their white counterparts, and more likely to live in medically underserved areas, where primary care is sparse or expensive.
New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo once called the coronavirus a “great equalizer”, yet the data shows the coronavirus has been anything but indiscriminate.
“We know that black Americans are particularly vulnerable. This is a social, economic and racial justice issue,” Kristen Clarke of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights said. “How one community is treated impacts all communities across the country.”
Governor JB Pritkzer of Illinois acknowledged racism’s role in the state’s response to the outbreak, but he called it “a much broader problem” that won’t be solved in a matter of weeks. “It’s hard to make up for decades, maybe centuries, of inequality of application of healthcare to people of color,” he said.
Louisiana, a major US hotspot, was the first southern state to categorize Covid-19 deaths by race. The virus has spread to nearly every parish in the state, but the worst of the outbreak has been focused on New Orleans, a majority-black city with one of the country’s highest metro poverty rates. Louisiana has the fourth largest number of Covid-19 cases in the country, and the majority of the Covid-19 deaths are in New Orleans, where black Americans constitute 60% of the population.
“Slightly more than 70% of coronavirus deaths in Louisiana are African Americans,” the state’s governor, John Bel Edwards, said in a press conference on Monday. “That deserves more attention and we’re going to have to dig into that to see what we can do to slow that down.”
In Georgia, an incomplete data picture still shows African Americans – who make up 33% of the state’s population, compared with 60% for whites – are being hit disproportionately hard by the virus. On Wednesday Georgia’s department of public health began releasing the racial breakdown of confirmed coronavirus cases. Twenty per cent of the 9,901 confirmed coronavirus cases are black, compared with 15% who are white. But the vast majority of cases – 64% – are of an “unknown race”. A spokesperson said the agency was working to retroactively collect the missing information on race.
Mississippi’s department of health has yet to release any information on the racial breakdown of coronavirus’s impact. But in an emailed statement a spokesperson said: “At this time, the African American community seems to be hit hard.”
In Alabama, a similar story is playing out.
Data released on Tuesday by the state’s department of public health showed black Alabamians are being infected and killed by the virus at a disproportionate rate. Black and white patients made up an equal proportion of deaths, at about 44% each. But, of the over 2,000 infections confirmed statewide by 6 April, only 37% were black, while 50% were white. Alabama’s population is about 27% black and 69% white, according to the latest census data.
South Carolina is reporting 36% of Covid-19 cases are African American, compared with 56% white. Those numbers appear to be based on about 1,000 cases, less than half of the state’s current coronavirus tally of 2,417.
Midwestern cities including Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee are also reporting an increasing imbalance.
Detroit, which is almost 80% black, has the most concentrated coronavirus cases in the state of Michigan. The death rate in the city accounts for 40% of overall deaths in the state.
In Chicago, which is 30% black, black Americans account for 70% of all coronavirus cases in the city and more than half of the state’s deaths. “We know all too well that there are general disparities in health outcomes that play along racial lines and the same may be true for this virus,” said Ngozi Esike, director of the Illinois department of public health.
In Wisconsin, more than half of the state’s 86 confirmed deaths are in the city of Milwaukee. Limited testing and slow public outreach resulted in the number of cases in the city jumping from just one to more than 350 in less than two weeks. Health officials said the virus was probably introduced to the city after its first infected resident came in contact with someone from an affluent, white suburb nearby.
The state representative David Bowen, who is black, explained, “When white communities get sick, we in the black community are threatened to die from the same sickness, with lack of healthcare often leaving us to self-diagnose,” he said.
African Americans face a higher risk of exposure to the virus, mostly on account of concentrating in urban areas and working in essential industries. Only 20% of black workers reported being eligible to work from home, compared with about 30% of their white counterparts, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The virus has killed a high number of older black men because of this, though there have also been outbreaks among women and young African Americans in the south.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/black-americans-coronavirus-us-south-data
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