Black Americans face alarming infection rates
In Louisiana, one of the states most devastated by the coronavirus, about 70% of the people who have died are African American, officials announced, though only a third of the state’s population is black.
In the county around Milwaukee, where 27% of residents are black, nearly twice as many African American residents tested positive for the virus as white people, figures released this week show.
And in Chicago, where African American residents make up a little less than a third of the population, more than half of those found to have the virus are black. The death toll there is even more alarming: African American residents make up 72% of those who have succumbed to the virus.
“Those numbers take your breath away, they really do,” said Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago, who announced the city’s figures Monday. “This is a calltoaction moment for all of us.”
Lightfoot, the first black woman to be elected mayor of the city, said in an interview that the statistics were “among the most shocking things I think I’ve seen as mayor.”
Data on the race of Americans who have been sickened by the coronavirus has been made public in only a handful of places, and it is too limited at this point, experts say, to make sweeping conclusions about the national or longterm picture. But day by day, the emerging statistics show black residents being infected at disturbing rates in some of the nation’s largest cities and states.
The racial disparities in coronavirus cases and outcomes, public health researchers said, reflect what happens when a viral pandemic is layered on top of entrenched inequalities.
The data emerging in some places, researchers said, is partly explained by factors that could make black Americans more vulnerable in any outbreak: They are less likely to be insured, more likely to have existing health conditions and, as a result of implicit racial bias, more likely to be denied testing and treatment. And then, the researchers said, there is the highly infectious nature of the coronavirus in a society where black Americans disproportionately hold jobs that do not allow them to stay at home.
States such as North Carolina and South Carolina have reported that, when compared with white residents, black residents account for a higher proportion of positive coronavirus tests than they represent in the general population. Black people are overrepresented compared with white people among those infected in the Las Vegas area and among those who have tested positive for the virus in Connecticut. In Minnesota, African Americans have been infected with the coronavirus at rates roughly proportionate to their percentage of the state’s population.