Photo: National Guard Members at COVID-19 testing clinic in New Orleans, Louisiana. DAN FARREL. U.S. Air Force.
by Brittanyana Pierro and Natalie Arneson
With nearly 1.3 million recorded cases, the United States now makes up over one-third of all global COVID-19 cases. Among the cases that have been tracked nationally, and in individual states, there have been major discrepancies in racial demographics affected by the disease. In sum, racial and ethnic minorities have been mostly bearing the brunt of COVID-19 cases and deaths.
Nationwide, one of the hardest-hit groups has been the African American population. On May 6, a CNN article reported that “ … counties with higher black populations account for more than half of all Covid-19 cases and almost 60% of deaths.” In Chicago, Detroit and Louisiana, African Americans are only 30-40% of the population, but they currently make up over 70% of the deaths in each region. The CDC website states that there is also “ … an overrepresentation of blacks among hospitalized patients,” nationwide. The website goes on to cite a report by NYC public health that displays the city’s number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, death rates and hospitalizations, all of which tracked African Americans as the largest number of people affected, followed by the Latinx community.
Other racial minority groups are also disproportionately affected by the Coronavirus pandemic. America’s Asian population has seen the greatest disparity in Alabama, with Asians accounting for 1% of the population but 4% of the cases. In Iowa, where the population is only 6% Hispanic, 22% of COVID-19 cases have been found within the Hispanic community. In Wisconsin, the situation is similar with 7% of the population being Hispanic but making up 12% of the cases. Washington state is not an outlier in this phenomenon. The largest discrepancy among the state’s demographics also rests in our Latinx community, who accounts for only 12.4% percent of the population, but 31% of cases statewide, according to the Washington Department of Health. In King County, home of Seattle, Hispanic people “ … have died from COVID-19 at a rate nearly two-and-a-half times higher than that of white people,” according to an article in the Seattle Times.
A major issue that has been affecting the Native American/Alaskan Native and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander populations, along with disproportionate numbers in cases, has been a severe lack of documentation of COVID-19 related statistics within communities. According to an article from APM Research Lab, “COVID-19 mortality data for Americans who are Indigenous, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders, ‘Other’ races, or Multiracial is inconsistently reported by many states. Indigenous and Pacific Islander people appear in the ‘Other’ group in many states, along with Multiracial Americans and in a few cases, Asian Americans.” These kinds of discrepancies have led to an alarming lack of data for many Native communities. In states that have been able to track the number of cases, the disparities are shocking. In New Mexico, where Native Americans/Alaskan Natives make up 9% of the population, they account for 37% of the confirmed cases. The Navajo Nation, a sovereign territory within the U.S., is shown to have the third-highest infection rate after New York and New Jersey, but the Nation has no accurate way to measure just how far COVID-19 has spread among its community because of an underfunding of their Indian Health Service (IHS). This chronic underfunding is part of the pattern caused by broken treaties between the U.S. Federal Government and several Native American communities, including the Navajo Nation. In these treaties, Native tribes gave certain rights in exchange for the funding of reliable infrastructures such as healthcare, but the U.S. government has consistently chosen to not deliver on the terms promised in these legally-binding agreements. In the words of Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez., “We are United States citizens but we’re not treated like that.”
Dr. Patti Rose, a public health expert and author, created a webinar discussing the health disparities in these communities across the nation and their causes.“When data leans in a particular direction, demographically, particularly in terms of higher mortality rates amongst specific groups, namely Black and Brown people, there needs to be a question of why this is happening.” She continued, “As soon as the demographic data began to be released … we immediately began to see that Black people and Brown people were being affected to a greater degree than any other group in the nation. And this comes as a surprise to many, but it is not a surprise because it is the reality all of the time in the United States of America.”
The reality she is speaking of is both the preexisting health discrepancies among communities of color and white communities, that has been a major cause of the inequity of case and death rates, along with the socioeconomic issues that hinder these communities’ access to treatments and prevention, putting them at a significantly higher risk of contracting the Coronavirus.
One of the most important of these socioeconomic issues revolves around housing justice. As the CDC Website states, “ … members of racial and ethnic minorities may be more likely to live in densely populated areas because of institutional racism in the form of residential housing segregation.” Within these segregated communities, there is a lack of access to healthcare or healthcare professionals and a higher usage of necessary public spaces like public transportation. It is also more common for Black and Brown people in lower-income communities to work in professions that are considered ‘essential’, though they are not compensated for doing so.
A history of systemic discrimination has left African Americans and other ethnic minorities to be targets of a racially-biased government, justice system and society. The current issues of racial inequality among groups most negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, along with other recent tragic events, prove this fact and let the public know that the perils of systemic racism are far from over.
