Much is being made about the disparate impact Covid-19 is having on black communities throughout the United States. No less a person than the surgeon general highlighted this in black and white during a recent White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing.
It was notable enough that Surgeon General Jerome Adams was the only black on the podium. But then he got personal.
He shared that, growing up in poverty, he had limited access to good healthcare and nutrition. He then explained how this caused him to develop asthma and all kinds of maladies that made him – and tens of millions who grew up in similar circumstances – particularly vulnerable (for life) to viruses like Covid-19.
But Oprah Winfrey soon one-upped Adams with her OWN special “Oprah Talks Covid-19 — The Deadly Impact on Black America.” She explained her mission as follows:
[I]t’s ‘our responsibility’ to convey to black Americans they are at a higher risk of contracting – and even dying from – the disease if they have preexisting conditions like diabetes, hypertension, heart disease or asthma.
(ABC News, April 14, 2020)
Mind you, only a handful of cities and states are bothering to track coronavirus deaths by race. But one can extrapolate from New York City data:
In a report released April 8 by the city, officials revealed that the Covid-19 death rate for Hispanic residents was nearly 23 per 100,000 people, and for black residents it was 20 per 100,000 people. The death rate for whites and Asians was 10 per 100,000 and 8 per 100,000, respectively.
(U.S. News & World Report, April 13, 2020)
In other words, Covid-19 is killing blacks and Latinos at twice the rate it’s killing whites. But the main point is that there’s probably no black or Latino on this planet who does not have one or more of those preexisting conditions. And I can personally attest to that.
I appreciate Oprah and Adams feeling a special responsibility to convey this message. Not least because black social-media influencers are out there propagating all kinds of dangerous misinformation – from black people being naturally immune to COVID-19 to marijuana being a miracle cure for it.
Incidentally, blacks are always cheering when Oprah and Obama lapse into Ebonics to get their points across to black folks. Therefore, only self-abnegating partisanship explains the idiots jeering when Adams did so.
That said, as my title indicates, this is not a black disease like sickle cell. In fact, data show that diabetes, asthma, and similar preexisting conditions make poor whites just as vulnerable to Covid-19. And, yes, many more of them are dying.
The only difference is that the legacies of racism have kept a far greater proportion of blacks mired in the kind of poverty that gave rise to the health vulnerabilities they suffer today. Of course, the legacies of poverty also mean that blacks work in many low-paying, frontline jobs (e.g., in supermarkets), which preclude social-distancing and subject them to far greater exposure to Covid-19. These are the reasons why blacks are dying so disproportionately.
Poverty is as much, if not more, of a determining factor for impact than race. So imagine what this portends when this virus spreads throughout Native-American reservations here and poor countries not just in Africa but South Asia and the Pacific too. Except that political dysfunction will cause millions who die in those regions to go unreported – just as political compulsion has mandated that hundreds of thousands who died in China go unreported.
No doubt shedding light on this disparate impact is good. But, despite all the political talk about redressing it, I fear black and poor folks will be just as vulnerable the next time a coronavirus breaks out.
Nothing telegraphs this quite like reports about Amazon’s Jeff Bezos increasing his net worth from $24 billion to $138 billion since this outbreak. Because workers at several of its warehouses (here and in Europe) had to mount wildcat strikes just to get Amazon to provide basic workplace protections against Covid-19. Not to mention its steadfast refusal to pay them a living wage and offer the panoply of benefits unionized workers enjoy.
Plus ça change: The rich get richer and the poor get poorer … and sicker to boot.
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