The Covid-19 pandemic is disproportionately hitting communities that have historically suffered from racism and unequal treatment, including African Americans, Latinx, immigrants, and Native Americans. In Chicago, for example, African Americans are just 30% of the population, but they account for 70% of the city’s virus deaths. Below are some recent remarks from two public figures dealing with this question.
Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, family physician, epidemiologist, and past president of the American Public Health Association: “Covid-19 is exposing U.S. racism in a stark new way, because the black and brown bodies are piling up so fast that these deaths can’t be normalized or ignored. And the way that racism is operating in this pandemic. . .It’s increasing exposure to the virus, and it has increased vulnerability to the virus. . . .We are in more front-facing, low-income, underappreciated jobs, where we are part of the essential workforce that really isn’t getting its full attention, and certainly not getting the full protection that we need. [And] racism has increased the vulnerability of us to this virus, because living in racially segregated communities that are resource segregated, without adequate access to food, and [suffer] environmental racism. . .has made us carry in our bodies all of those same diseases—diabetes, high blood pressure, renal disease, asthma—that are making people who get infected by the virus sicker and die faster from it. [There are] three principles for achieving health equity: valuing all individuals and populations equally, recognizing and rectifying historical injustices, and providing resources according to need—not equally, but according to need.”
Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose district in New York includes parts of Queens and the Bronx, and the Rikers Island jail: “The community surrounding Elmhurst Hospital and Elmhurst, Queens is one of the most working-class and blackest and brownest [and heavily immigrant] communities in New York City….now that we have this pandemic and it is hardest-hitting in communities that are heavily immigrant and also with strong historically black communities, as well, that people are either afraid to go to Elmhurst Hospital out of the cost or out of sheer fear that they will be put in the public charge list [and deported]….We’ve been calling very strongly on the governor and the mayor to take a strong decarceral approach to Rikers [where an inmate died from the virus]….And that also goes for our immigration detention facilities….ICE is knowingly packing these detention facilities with people who have not committed crimes.”
As we go to print, it is reported that Native American communities are also disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. New statewide data, for example, shows that more than 36% of all positive cases in New Mexico are Native Americans.
