At first, COVID-19 did not seem to discriminate. The patients who walked into Dr. Uché Blackstock’s urgent-care clinics in Brooklyn, N.Y., with coughs and fevers were white, black and brown.
But in the last few weeks, she has witnessed a notable shift: Fewer white people have showed up, while there has been a dramatic uptick in the number of black and brown patients.
Many are lower-income service workers and essential workers — delivery drivers, police officers, subway workers, corrections officers — who do not have the luxury of working from home or retreating to a second home in a less dense community.

As the novel coronavirus sweeps across the United States, it appears to be infecting and killing black Americans at a disproportionately high rate, according to a Washington Post analysis of early data from jurisdictions across the country.
The emerging stark racial disparity led the surgeon general Tuesday to acknowledge in personal terms the increased risk for African Americans amid growing demands that public-health officials release more data on the race of those who are sick, hospitalized and dying of a contagion that has killed more than 12,000 people in the United States.
A Post analysis of available data and census demographics shows that counties that are majority-black have three times the rate of infections and almost six times the rate of deaths as counties where white residents are in the majority.