racial disparities | Multicultural Meanderings

New Survey Highlights Racial Disparities In The Coronavirus Pandemic

2020/04/16 Leave a comment

Yet more evidence:

A Pew Research Center survey conducted this month among 4,917 U.S. adults found that 27% of black people personally knew someone who was hospitalized with or died from COVID-19, compared to just 1 in 10 white and Hispanic people.

The results highlight how coronavirus is disproportionately affecting lower-income people of color.

The survey asked people how concerned they were about contracting coronavirus; of those polled 24% say they are very concerned about getting the virus. Of that group, one-third had lower incomes, versus just 17% classified as upper-income. Of that very concerned population, 43% were Hispanic, 31% black and 18% white.

Differences in income and race were also highlighted in responses to a question that asked people how concerned they were about unknowingly passing on the virus to others. Thirty-three percent of people surveyed said they were very concerned about passing on the virus without knowing; that percentage was composed by nearly half of Hispanic adults and 38% of black adults, compared to 28% of white adults. Thirty-eight percent of those very concerned that they could pass coronavirus to others unknowingly were lower income.

In the last weeks in places like New York city and Chicago, officials have reported people of color dying at higher rates from coronavirus compared to white people. Experts say this isn’t because minorities are biologically predisposed to the disease, but as Dr. Jerome Adams, the U.S. surgeon general, said at the White House briefing last week, people of color are “more likely to live in densely packed areas and in multigenerational housing situations, which create higher risk for spread of highly contagious disease like COVID-19.”

Source: New Survey Highlights Racial Disparities In The Coronavirus Pandemic

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with COVID-19, Pew Research, racial disparities

CDC Hospital Data Point To Racial Disparity In COVID-19 Cases

2020/04/11 2 Comments

More on racial disparities:

About 1 in 3 people who become sick enough to require hospitalization from COVID-19 were African American, according to hospital data from the first month of the U.S. epidemic released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Even though 33% of those hospitalized patients were black, African Americans constitute 13% of the U.S. population. By contrast, the report found that 45% of hospitalizations were among white people, who make up 76% percent of the population. And 8% of hospitalizations were among Hispanics, who make up 18% of the population.

Don’t see the graphic above? Click here.

The study of about 1,500 hospitalized patients in 14 states underscores the long-standing racial disparities in health care in the U.S. It also echoes what has been seen in other coronavirus outbreaks around the world — people with chronic health conditions have a higher likelihood of developing a serious illness after being infected with coronavirus. The findings appear in the MMWR, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Overall, the report found that about 90% of people in the hospital with COVID-19 had at least one underlying health condition. Half (50%) had high blood pressure, 48% were obese, 35% had chronic lung disease and 28% had diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Hospitalizations were highest among people 65 and older, and about 54% of those hospitalized were men.

People who were hospitalized had a wide range of symptoms. The most common symptoms at the time of hospital admission were cough (86%), fever or chills (85%), and/or shortness of breath (80%). Upset stomach and gastrointestinal symptoms were documented as well: 27% had diarrhea and 24% reported nausea or vomiting.

Asked about the reports of health disparities and racial divide at a White House coronavirus task force briefing on Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said that African Americans do not seem more likely to be infected by coronavirus.

But he added that “underlying medical conditions, [including] diabetes, hypertension, obesity, [and] asthma” might make it more likely that African Americans are admitted to the ICU or die from the disease. “We really do need to address” the health disparities that exist in the U.S., Fauci said.

“These findings underscore the importance of preventive measures (e.g., social distancing, respiratory hygiene, and wearing face coverings in public settings where social distancing measures are difficult to maintain),” the authors of the report write, “to protect older adults and persons with underlying medical conditions, as well as the general public.”

Source: CDC Hospital Data Point To Racial Disparity In COVID-19 Cases

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with COVID-19, racial disparities, USA

The Racial Time Bomb in the Covid-19 Crisis Pre-existing health conditions leave one group particularly vulnerable.

2020/04/03 Leave a comment

While Canadian universal healthcare will ensure that racial disparities in death rates should be less than in the USA, expect to see some differences and hopefully the data is being collected on COVID-19 victims beyond age and gender:

Early Monday morning the email arrived. The subject line began, “ALARM AT THE GATE,” written in all caps. Someone had died. That is always what that phrasing means.

The message came via a group email list maintained by the fraternity I joined in college some 30 years ago.

A younger member, a rising chef in his 30s, had died. As the email read, he passed away “due to immune system complications resulting from contracting the Covid-19 virus as a Type-1 diabetic.” He was in Detroit, which has emerged as a hot spot for the virus.

This was the third death I’d heard about of someone with a connection to my college or a friend who went there. All relatively young, all black men, all diabetics. The two others were in New Orleans, another emerging hot spot.

I recalled an arresting article I’d read from “Undark,” a Knight Foundation-funded, science-oriented digital magazine in Cambridge, Mass. (I’m on the advisory board of the magazine.) As the article pointed out, the virus may prove most devastating in the South because of “poorer health, curbed health care access and skepticism of government.”

What the article doesn’t state outright, but I read in the subtext, was that the virus is more likely to be deadly to black people. Most black people in America still live in the South. The states with the highest percentage of black people are in the South.

We may be waiting for a racial time bomb to explode with this disease.

In the early days of the virus, the relatively few cases on the African continent, I believe, gave black people in America a false sense of security, that black people may be somehow less susceptible to it.

But that is not true, and African-Americans should not look to Africa as the model. Even as researchers worry about Africans’ vulnerabilities — some being the same issues that exist in the American South — African countries also have advantages that America and, in particular, African-Americans don’t.

As Berkeley economist Edward Miguel explained, “The median age in a lot of countries is 20 or 18, much younger than in Europe, and it appears that young people who are infected are often asymptomatic or just get a cold.” The median age in the United States is 38. Furthermore, some African nations have a medical infrastructure experienced in dealing with pandemics, and in many cases people still live in rural areas.

But what is most worrisome is the racial disparity in prior health conditions that exist in the United States. As Bloomberg reportedabout a study of the deaths in Italy: “Almost half of the victims suffered from at least three prior illnesses, and about a fourth had either one or two previous conditions. More than 75 percent had high blood pressure, about 35 percent had diabetes and a third suffered from heart disease.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, high blood pressure is most common in non-Hispanic black adults (54 percent), and black people have the highest death rate from heart disease.

As for diabetes, the 2015 National Medical Association Scientific Assembly, held in Detroit, where my friend died, delivered thesestark statistics:

“African-American patients are more likely than white patients to have diabetes. The risk of diabetes is 77 percent higher among African-Americans than among non-Hispanic white Americans. The rates of diagnosis of diabetes in non-Hispanic African-Americans is 18.7 percent compared to 7.1 percent.”

The group went on to say that in 2006, “African-Americans with diabetes were 1.5 times more likely to be hospitalized and 2.3 times more likely to die from diabetes than non-Hispanic whites.”

In addition, many Southern states refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and there is a rural hospital crisis in this country. But that crisis is compounded in the South, where, as the magazine Facing South points out, the rural areas “have higher poverty rates, higher mortality rates, and lower life expectancies than other rural regions of the country.”

This all worries me, because I take a lesson from the H.I.V./AIDS crisis. In the beginning, it was largely seen as a New York and San Francisco problem affecting white men who were gay. Over the decades, treatments became available, and those cities saw their new infection rates plummet.

But the disease remained very much alive, particularly in the South, particularly among black people, where it has reached epidemic proportions. In the United States, more than 40 percent of people living with H.I.V. and 40 percent of people with new infections are black, according to the C.D.C., and “African-American men accounted for three-quarters of new H.I.V. infections among African-Americans in 2016, and 80 percent of these were among African-American gay and bisexual men.”

Black people were already suffering through an epidemic, one with treatments that could have arrested it, and yet it rarely made the news.

We know that if a person is under treatment and the H.I.V. is well controlled, meaning undetectable, there is “effectively no risk” of transmitting the virus. We also know that drugs can be taken to prevent contracting the disease.

But here, the connection must be made with that refusal to expand Medicaid. As the Kaiser Family Foundation has pointed out:“Medicaid beneficiaries with H.I.V. are more likely to be male (56 percent vs. 42 percent), black (50 percent vs. 22 percent) and between the ages of 45-64 (54 percent vs. 13 percent) than the Medicaid population over all.”

On some level, H.I.V. is ravaging the South because Southern states have made a policy decision not to care in a sufficient way because the people suffering are poor and black.

And many of these people are also vulnerable to this new virus, as Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, said at a news conference a couple of weeks ago. “We are all very worried about” long-term survivors of H.I.V., many of whom “still carry a level of immune-compromise,” she noted.

I don’t want that to be the future of Covid-19 and black America.

The problem we have now is that we don’t see the racial demographic data for this virus.

I echo the concerns of Senator Elizabeth Warren, Representative Ayanna Pressley and others who wrote Friday to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:

“The C.D.C. is currently failing to collect and publicly report on the racial and ethnic demographic information of patients tested for and affected by Covid-19. Our concerns echo those from some physicians: that decisions to test individuals for the novel coronavirus may be ‘more vulnerable to the implicit biases that every patient and medical professional carry around with them,’ potentially causing ‘black communities and other underserved groups … [to] disproportionately mis[s] out on getting tested for Covid-19.’”

The letter went on: “Although Covid-19 does not discriminate along racial or ethnic lines, existing racial disparities and inequities in health outcomes and health care access may mean that the nation’s response to preventing and mitigating its harms will not be felt equally in every community.”

I have been communicating with my niece, Cortney, a nurse on the front lines of the crisis in Louisiana. (She’s actually my niece’s half sister, but my brothers and I have always called her our niece as well.)

She has seen racial disparities in treatments but also black people being hit particularly hard by the disease, something that she says others in the state are also seeing. As she messaged me: “I can’t speak for the U.S. as a whole, but in the South, particularly Louisiana, we are seeing more black cases that aren’t responding well to the virus.”

We need data to know if her observations are anomalous or endemic.

People like to say “we’re all in this together,” but black people have every right to respond, “but will we all emerge from it together?”

Source: The Racial Time Bomb in the Covid-19 Crisis

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Charles M. Blow, COVID-19, racial disparities

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Multicultural Meanderings

New Survey Highlights Racial Disparities In The Coronavirus Pandemic

CDC Hospital Data Point To Racial Disparity In COVID-19 Cases

The Racial Time Bomb in the Covid-19 Crisis Pre-existing health conditions leave one group particularly vulnerable.

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