Coronavirus
Second death seen in Washington state as infection confirmed in more states.
Stay home from work if you get sick. See a doctor. Use a separate bathroom from the people you live with. Prepare for schools to close and to work from home. These are measures the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended to slow a coronavirus outbreak in the United States.
Yet these are much easier to do for certain people — in particular, high-earning professionals. Service industry workers — like those in restaurants, retail, child care and the gig economy — are much less likely to have paid sick days, the ability to work remotely or employer-provided health insurance.
The disparity could make the new coronavirus, which causes a respiratory illness known as COVID-19, harder to contain in the U.S. than in other rich countries that have universal benefits like health care and sick leave, experts say. A large segment of workers are not able to stay home, and many of them work in jobs that include high contact with other people. It could also mean low-income workers are hit harder by the virus.
“Very quickly, it’s going to circulate a lot faster in the poorer communities than the wealthiest ones,” said James Hadler, an epidemiologist who was Connecticut’s public health director and now is a consultant to the state. His work has found that influenza infections tend to strike low-income neighborhoods more aggressively than a±uent ones and that poor families are more likely to live in close quarters with others and share bathrooms.
Unequal access to precautionary measures cuts along the same lines that divide the U.S. in other ways: income, education and race.
“It’s definitely an equity issue,” said Alex Baptiste, policy counsel for workplace programs at the National Partnership for Women & Families, a nonprofit advocacy group. “You have not just an economic disparity but also a racial disparity between who has that access and can take care of themselves and their families.”
The biggest disparity for workers is access to health care: In the U.S., some 27.5 million people lack any form of health insurance. That makes them less likely to seek medical care when they become ill or to have access to preventive health benefits that can help them stave off illness. The uninsured are disproportionately low income.
Workers also have unequal access to remote working. The government recommended that people work from home in a coronavirus outbreak, but just 29 percent of American workers can do so, according to Labor Department data. They are most likely to be highly educated and high earners.
On an average day, 35 percent of the highest earners and 8 percent of the lowest earners spend some time working from home. Managers and professionals are most likely to do so, and service industry and construction workers least likely. Nearly half of workers with a graduate degree do some of their work from home, as do a third of those with a college degree.