It has been clear for some time that the coronavirus pandemic is killing black and Latino Americans at disproportionately high rates, but new data from the last few days reveals just how devastating the Covid-19 crisis has been for people of color.

Starting in New York City, the American epicenter of the outbreak: 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.
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/17/21225610/us-coronavirus-death-rates-blacks-latinos-whites

It has been clear for some time that the coronavirus pandemic is killing black and Latino Americans at disproportionately high rates, but new data from the last few days reveals just how devastating the Covid-19 crisis has been for people of color.

Starting in New York City, the American epicenter of the outbreak: 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.


New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
Mother Jones compiled data from all of the states that break out their coronavirus data by race and ethnicity. The same thing we’re seeing in New York City is happening across the country: Black and Latino Americans get infected with Covid-19 at alarmingly high rates and more are dying than we would expect based on their share of the population.

A few horrifying examples from the charts you can find in the link above:

In Wisconsin, black people represent 6 percent of the population and nearly 40 percent of Covid-19 fatalities
In Louisiana, black people make up 32 percent of the state’s population but almost 60 percent of fatalities
In Kansas, 6 percent of the population is black and yet black people account for more than 30 percent of the Covid-19 deaths
The proportions can change depending on the state, but the trends are consistent anywhere you look: Compared to their share of the population, greater numbers of people of color die than their white neighbors in this pandemic.

Why is that? Well, there are the more acute reasons (black and Latino people are being put at risk more in their day-to-day lives) and then there are the structural reasons (long-standing economic and health disparities between white people and people of color).

On the first, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in NYC is a useful and disturbing example. As the New York Times reported last week, bus and subway workers have been hit hard by the coronavirus: 41 dead and more than 6,000 either diagnosed with Covid-19 or self-quarantining because they have symptoms that suggest an infection, as of April 8.

Who works for the MTA? Black people and Latinos. They account for more than 60 percent of the agency’s workforce in New York City, according to estimates from 2016.

Black people in particular are overrepresented in the MTA; they are 46 percent of the city’s transportation workers versus 24 percent of its overall population. (White people, on the other hand, make up 30 percent of local MTA employees but 43 percent of NYC residents.)

This is, again, true across cities and sectors. As Devan Hawkins wrote in the Guardian, black Americans are more likely than white Americans to be employed in the essential services that have been exempted from state stay-at-home orders, and they are more likely to work in health care and in hospitals. In America as in other countries, health care workers make up a disproportionate share of Covid-19 cases.

So the steps states and cities have taken to restrict public activities and slow the spread of the coronavirus, while undoubtedly necessary and productive, have still left people of color more exposed to infection and, ultimately, death during the pandemic.

Those risks are exacerbated by long-standing health inequities in America.

As Fabiola Cineas wrote for Vox last week, black Americans have historically had higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure than white Americans — all of which make a patient more vulnerable to developing a severe case of Covid-19 and ultimately dying.

I would add that they are also more likely to be uninsured, again for both structural reasons (all the states in the Deep South except for Louisiana have refused to expand Medicaid, which disproportionately hurts black people) and because of the immediate crisis (black people were more likely to lose their job in the recent surge in unemployment). The same is true for Latinos.

And those are the macro trends. All over the country, smaller controversies and policy choices also worsen the health of black Americans and weaken their ability to stay safe during the Covid-19 pandemic. Even something as seemingly simple as clean water to wash hands can be hard to come by for people of color, as this reporting by Khushbu Shah for Vox on Detroit (with 13,000 cases and 1,000 deaths in Wayne County) reveals:

Since 2014, over 140,000 homes in Detroit have had their water service disconnected as part of a debt-payment program, according to records obtained by local news outlet the Bridge. In 2019, more than 23,000 accounts had their water shut off, and 37 percent still hadn’t had service restored as of mid-January. With the virus spreading, the city promised to restore water to residents, but as of March 31, had only done so for 1,050 of the 10,000 people who called with a water service problem (8,000 of those callers did not qualify for the Coronavirus Water Restart Plan, according to a city report).

“They put the onus on the customer to have to go in and take affirmative steps [to restore their water], so there are a lot of people who do not know, or secondly, don’t have the ability to go in and meet with someone,” says veteran civil rights lawyer Alice Jennings, who is working to restore water to the city’s most vulnerable. Her daughter, a Detroit teacher and a cancer survivor, is battling coronavirus.

Community groups, in the meantime, she said, are passing around five gallons of water to residents who don’t have water for drinking, cooking, or bathing, but Jennings doubts that residents are using the scarce water they have to wash their hands. “If the primary recommendation is ‘wash your hands, continuously, wash your hands,’ and there’s no water in the house to wash your hands,” the number of cases is certain to skyrocket, Jennings says.

For decades — centuries, really — America has failed the black and brown people who call it home. Today, as the coronavirus continues to take its toll, they are stuck paying the price for that failure.

Correction: This post has been updated to remove inaccurate test and population data on Latinos in California and Arizona.

This story appears in VoxCare, a newsletter from Vox on the latest twists and turns in America’s health care debate. Sign up to get VoxCare in your inbox along with more health care stats and news.

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We shall overcome.

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.
In Milwaukee County, home to Wisconsin’s largest city, African Americans account for about 70 percent of the dead but just 26 percent of the population. The disparity is similar in Louisiana, where 70 percent of the people who have died were black, although African Americans make up just 32 percent of the state’s population.

In Michigan, where the state’s 845 reported deaths outrank all but New York’s and New Jersey’s, African Americans account for 33 percent of cases and roughly 40 percent of deaths, despite comprising only 14 percent of the population. The state does not offer a breakdown of race by county or city, but more than a quarter of deaths occurred in Detroit, where African Americans make up 79 percent of the population.

And in Illinois, a disparity nearly identical to Michigan’s exists at the state level, but the picture becomes far starker when looking at data just from Chicago, where black residents have died at a rate six times that of white residents. Of the city’s 118 reported deaths, nearly 70 percent were black — a share 40 points greater than the percentage of African Americans living in Chicago.

President Trump publicly acknowledged for the first time the racial disparity at the White House task force briefing Tuesday.

“We are doing everything in our power to address this challenge, and it’s a tremendous challenge,” Trump said. “It’s terrible.” He added that Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “is looking at it very strongly."

“Why is it three or four times more so for the black community as opposed to other people?” Trump said. “It doesn’t make sense, and I don’t like it, and we are going to have statistics over the next probably two to three days.”

[Has someone close to you died from covid-19? Share their story with The Post.]

Detailed data on the race of coronavirus patients has been reported publicly in fewer than a dozen states and several more counties.

African Americans’ higher rates of diabetes, heart disease and lung disease are well-documented, and Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) noted that those health problems make people more vulnerable to the new respiratory disease. But there never has been a pandemic that brought the disparities so vividly into focus.

The crisis is “shining a bright light on how unacceptable” those disparities are, Fauci said at the briefing. “There is nothing we can do about it right now except to try and give” African Americans “the best possible care to avoid complications.”

“I’ve shared myself personally that I have high blood pressure,” said Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who is 45, “that I have heart disease and spent a week in the [intensive care unit] due to a heart condition, that I actually have asthma and I’m prediabetic, and so I represent that legacy of growing up poor and black in America.”

On Monday, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and hundreds of doctors joined a group of Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Cory Booker (N.J.) and Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), in demanding that the federal government release daily race and ethnicity data on coronavirus testing, patients and their health outcomes.
To date, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has only released figures by age and gender.
[Covid-19 is ravaging black communities. A Milwaukee neighborhood is figuring out how to fight back.]
Legislators, civic advocates and medical professionals say the information is needed to ensure that African Americans and other people of color have equal access to testing and treatment, and also to help to develop a public-health strategy to protect those who are more vulnerable.
In its letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, the Lawyers’ Committee said the Trump administration’s “alarming lack of transparency and data is preventing public health officials from understanding the full impact of this pandemic on Black communities and other communities of color.”
As pressure mounted, a CDC spokesman said Tuesday that the agency plans to include covid-19 hospitalizations by race and ethnicity in its next Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, more than six weeks after the first American died of the disease.
On Wednesday, the agency published the study, which examined nearly 1,500 hospitalized coronavirus patients across 14 states. The CDC had race data for just 580 of those patients, but the limited information showed a similar disparity: even though African Americans accounted for 18 percent of the population, they made up 33 percent of people hospitalized.
Health departments nationwide report coronavirus cases to the CDC using a standardized form that asks for a range of demographic information, including race and ethnicity. However, fields are often left blank and those local agencies are “under a tremendous amount of strain to collect and report case information,” said Scott Pauley, a CDC spokesman.

As the disease has spread in the United States, information on age, gender and county of residence also has been reported inconsistently and sporadically.

In some regions, lawmakers are pushing to fill the data gap on their own. Virginia reports the racial breakdown of its cases but not of its deaths. In neighboring Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said Tuesday the state would begin to release data about race, a day after more than 80 members of the House of Delegates sent him a letter asking for the information.

Del. Nick Mosby, a Democrat who represents Baltimore, has pushed for the data for weeks after he started hearing from friends, colleagues and his Omega Psi Phi fraternity brothers about black men who were infected or were dying of covid-19.

“It was kind of frightening,” Mosby said. “I started receiving calls about people I knew personally.”

In Washington, D.C., this week, district officials released race data for the first time, showing that the disease has killed African Americans in disproportionately high numbers. Nearly 60 percent of the District’s 22 fatalities were black, but African Americans make up about 46 percent of the city’s population.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/04/07/coronavirus-is-infecting-killing-black-americans-an-alarmingly-high-rate-post-analysis-shows/?arc404=true