COVID-19 disproportionately affects African Americans
14th April 2020 · 0 Comments
By Fritz Esker
Contributing Writer
The Louisiana Department of Health unveiled stats on April 5 that revealed that African Americans make up over 70 percent of COVID-19 fatalities in Louisiana despite being only 32 percent of the population.
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards addressed the racial disparity in fatality rates during his April 6 press briefing.
“Obviously, this is a big disparity, and we’re going to try to figure out what that’s attributable to and what we can do about that as quickly as possible,” said Governor Edwards at his press conference.
Governor Edwards added that the state’s demographic statistics would be updated once a week on Mondays at the Louisiana Department of Health’s website at ldh.la.gov.
The governor’s announcement came the same day the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a national civil rights group, and nearly 400 medical professionals called for the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to release daily racial and ethnic demographic data related to COVID-19 testings, cases and patient outcomes.
“We are deeply concerned that African-American communities are being hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, and that racial bias may be impacting the access they receive to testing and healthcare,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Equal access to health care is a critical civil rights issue, and during this novel pandemic, the public deserves nothing less than full transparency from this administration and state public health officials.”
In a letter to the HHS, the Law-yers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law wrote, “systemic racism and bias in the healthcare system have resulted in chronically poor health outcomes for Black Amer-icans, including higher rates of asthma, high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes. These co-morbidities render Black Americans more susceptible to severe respiratory complications and death resulting from COVID-19. Inclusive testing practices would help ensure that symptomatic people receive timely care and treatment, and asymptomatic carriers do not continue to transmit COVID-19 to other vulnerable members of their communities.”
Available data indicates that Louisiana isn’t the only state with COVID-19 disparities. In Illinois, African Americans make up 14.6 percent of the population, but make up 29.4 percent of confirmed cases and 41.2 percent of deaths as of April 6. Michigan’s population is 14 percent African American, but African Americans make up 34 percent of the state’s COVID-19 cases and 40 percent of its deaths.
On April 3, ProPublica stated that almost half of Milwaukee County’s 941 confirmed COVID-19 cases were African Americans and 81 percent of its 27 deaths were African Americans.
On April 7, the Congressional Black Caucus wrote a letter to Robert Redfield, M.D., Director for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), calling for immediate racial data reporting for COVID-19 in every state.
“Healthcare disparities in our country have been a long standing issue and concern for the Congres-sional Black Caucus,” said Congresswoman Karen Bass (D-CA), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. “The spread of the coronavirus has compounded these issues, leaving Black people even more vulnerable. We need to urgently address these disparities with a targeted response to our community.”
Glenn Ellis, medical ethicist and president of Strategies for Well-Being, a global consultancy specializing in health equity and advocacy, said the causes for COVID-19’s devastating effects on African-American communities are multi-faceted.
Ellis said the high rates of conditions like hypertension, diabetes and obesity contribute to the fatality rate. He also said cultural factors are at work. African Americans tend to be social and tend to have large extended families they see frequently, which would facilitate a quick spread of the disease.
People with lower-income jobs, such as many service industry positions, would also be exposed to high amounts of people and rely on public transportation, also increasing the likelihood of exposure.
Ellis added that a lack of health literacy also contributes to the COVID-19 cases in the African-American community. He said this is directly related to other systemic issues, such as public education. If people do not have a solid educational foundation, how can they be expected to understand the science behind a pandemic?
“It’s very difficult for anybody to grasp how viruses can spread,” Ellis said. “You can’t just improve health literacy in a vacuum. You have to improve education as a whole.”
Ellis also pointed out that many options government officials recommend are not available to underprivileged African Americans. For example, experts have urged people to call their primary care doctor first if they feel they have COVID-19 symptoms. But many poor people rely on Medicaid or Obamacare and do not have a relationship with a primary doctor they can call.
A lack of access to high-speed Internet also affects poor families. Many people with non-COVID 19 medical issues are being encouraged to take telemedicine appointments with their doctors. But if you don’t have high-speed Internet, you can’t utilize that option. A lack of Internet service also limits the amount of new information you can learn about the outbreak and the latest recommendations.
“This is an illuminating opportunity to really see what the institutional racism in our health care system has done to us,” Ellis said.
The Congressional Black Caucus’ April 7 letter echoed Ellis’ concerns, stating, “What we are seeing is more than just an overstretched healthcare system, but instead the result of years of systemic racism, disenfranchisement, and oppression of Black people in America. The reason more Blacks are dying from COVID-19 is a result of a history of structural racism, environmental injustice, income inequality, and the lack of resources in Black communities, which have led to the prominence of health-related risk factors such as diabetes and hypertension.”
District 93 State Representative Royce Duplessis also shared concerns about comorbitity and death rates amongst African Americans.
In an April 7 letter, Rep. Duplessis thanked Gov. Edwards for his leadership in combating the spread of COVID-19 but also urged him to take the discussion further by addressing the reason comorbities in Black communities exist.
“If we want to address the reality that the vast majority of deaths from COVID-19 are Black, we have to address the reality that the vast majority of people who rely on public transportation (for example) are also Black. I believe this is not simply a conversation around health disparities, alone,” Duplessis states in his letter. “This is a broader conversation about socio-economic policies that have institutionalized these poor health outcomes. Inequitable policies involving housing, environment, transportation, access to healthcare and healthy food, education, etc., must all be part of the analysis. This is in combination with ongoing implicit bias that exists in all corners of society. As you know, all of these have been social determinants contributing to the longstanding comorbidity factor.”
Requests for comment from the City of New Orleans and Mayor LaToya Cantrell were not returned
This article originally published in the April 13, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
