NEW ORLEANS — At first, COVID-19 did not seem to discriminate. The patients who walked into Dr. Uche 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.
“People say that COVID-19 is a great equalizer and that everyone’s going to be impacted,” said Blackstock, chief executive of Advancing Health Equity. “But the fact is that certain communities are more harshly impacted than others.”
The available data of the race of coronavirus victims — released by only a handful of states — bear out that observation, revealing a stark disparity between white and black residents.
In Michigan, black people have died at more than eight times the rate of white people. In Illinois, they have died at nearly six times the rate. In Louisiana, the difference is fivefold.
Public health experts said those figures reflected deep-rooted social and economic inequalities.
Not only are black Americans less likely to be insured and able to afford testing, but they are more likely to have underlying medical conditions such as asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease that could put them at higher risk for severe illness.
They are 60% more likely than white Americans to be diagnosed with diabetes and 40% more likely to have high blood pressure, according to the U.S. government.
“This virus is treading a glide path that unfortunately our society has paved through structural racism and poverty,” said Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a former director of the Detroit Health Department. “It is finding its way into our most vulnerable communities, who in our country tend to be disproportionately black and brown.”
The problem is compounded by the fact that many of the most vulnerable people work in service jobs that increase their risk of being exposed to the virus. Fewer than 20% of black workers are able to work from home compared with about one-third of their white counterparts, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Last week, Jason Hargrove, a 50-year-old bus driver from Detroit, died from complications of COVID-19 just 11 days after he posted a video railing against a woman on his bus who had just coughed four or five times without covering her mouth.
“We’re out here as public workers, doing our job, trying to make an honest living to take care of our families,” he said on the video. “But for you to get on the bus, and stand on the bus, and cough several times without covering up your mouth, and you know that we’re in the middle of a pandemic, that lets me know that some folks don’t care.”
On Monday, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and hundreds of doctors called on the federal government to begin reporting the racial and ethnic demographic data on COVID-19 immediately.
“Systemic racism and bias in the health care system have resulted in chronically poor health outcomes for black Americans,” Kristen Clarke, the president of the committee, wrote in a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “These co-morbidities render black Americans more susceptible to severe respiratory complications and death resulting from COVID-19.”
