Why African Americans
are dying at higher rates from COVID-19
The
new coronavirus isn t biased about who it infects -- so why does data
emerging from some states suggest that African Americans are bearing the brunt
of the pandemic in the US?
Experts
say blacks are disproportionately impacted by underlying health conditions
linked to poverty, face discrimination in medical care, and are more likely to
work jobs that require them to leave their home.
"We
know that blacks are more likely to have diabetes, heart disease, lung
disease," the nation s top doctor, Surgeon General Jerome Adams told
CBS News on Tuesday.
These
chronic illnesses, which are in turn linked to poverty and structural racism,
can lead to more serious forms of the COVID-19 disease.
Adams,
who is himself black and has high blood pressure and asthma, added: "I
represent that legacy of growing up poor and black in America.
"And
I, and many black Americans, are at higher risk for COVID."
- Emerging trend -
There
is no nationwide data available on COVID-19 cases by race, but a pattern of
over-representation by black Americans has emerged in states or jurisdictions
that are sharing the numbers.
Sixty-eight
percent of coronavirus deaths in Chicago have been among African Americans, who
make up just 30 percent of the city s population.
"Those
numbers take your breath away," the city s mayor Lori Lightfoot said
Monday at a coronavirus briefing. "This is a call to action for all of
us."
The
trend is repeated in North Carolina, Louisiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and the
capital Washington.
Doctor
Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association,
told AFP the issue was also linked to social class, with black people more
likely to work jobs deemed essential that expose them to potential infection.
"That
population is more public facing," he said. "More bus drivers, more
people taking public transportation to work, more people providing services in
nursing homes, more folks working in grocery stores."
- Structural bias -
The
problem is compounded by implicit and explicit bias that African Americans face
in the medical system.
Doctor
James Hildreth, president of the historically black Meharry Medical College in
Nashville, Tennessee told AFP that in his city, most of the initial testing
took place at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Most
of the patients who go to hospital systems like these have insurance, and it
was only recently that three assessment centers run by the city of Nashville
were built for the underprivileged and minority communities -- one of them
located at Meharry s campus and run by its staff.
"My
point is, depending on which community you live in, and whether or not you have
insurance... the chances for getting assessed are much less," he said.
What s
more, it s well documented that when black people seek care, they are less
likely to have their symptoms believed or get adequately treated, Doctor Ebony
Hilton, an anesthesiologist at the University of Virginia Medical Center told
AFP.
For
example, black women are less likely to have their breast cancer mammograms
seen by a specialist as opposed to a general radiologist, according to a 2012
study from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Black
heart patients who present with elevated levels of a group of proteins
indicating cardiac injury are also less likely to be seen by specialists, per a
2018 study.
A
civil rights group wrote this week to the US health secretary, Alex Azar,
calling on him to "release daily racial and ethnic demographic data related
to COVID-19 testing, disease burden and patient outcomes."
This,
said the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, was necessary to
ensure a robust public health response, and to make certain care and testing
aren t being administered in a discriminatory manner.
The
group said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was already
collecting the information but deliberately withholding it.
Hilton
stressed that it was in the interests of Americans as a whole to address the
problem, because -- unlike high rates of heart disease or cancer -- a wave of
coronavirus spreading through the black and Hispanic population will ultimately
impact everyone else.
"When
you have a system that s not treating these people of lower social
economic status and these minority groups, they are then not being tested,
they re sent back home to infect their community," she said.
"Those
workers who are now infected are going to the grocery store, and when the upper
echelon of America are going to get their food, they will get infected
too."