It has been clear for some time that the coronavirus pandemic is killing black and Latino Americans at disproportionately high rates, but new data from the last few days reveals just how devastating the Covid-19 crisis has been for people of color. 6park.com
Starting in New York City, the American epicenter of the outbreak: Black New Yorkers are dying at twice the rate of their white peers; Latinos in the city are also succumbing to the virus at a much higher rate than white or Asian New Yorkers. The same trends can be seen in infection and hospitalization rates, too.
Mother Jones compiled data from all of the states that break out their coronavirus data by race and ethnicity. The same thing we’re seeing in New York City is happening across the country: Black and Latino Americans get infected with Covid-19 at alarmingly high rates and more are dying than we would expect based on their share of the population. 6park.com
Why is that? Well, there are the more acute reasons (black and Latino people are being put at risk more in their day-to-day lives) and then there are the structural reasons (long-standing economic and health disparities between white people and people of color). 6park.com
On the first, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in NYC is a useful and disturbing example. As the New York Times reported last week, bus and subway workers have been hit hard by the coronavirus: 41 dead and more than 6,000 either diagnosed with Covid-19 or self-quarantining because they have symptoms that suggest an infection, as of April 8. 6park.com
Who works for the MTA? Black people and Latinos. They account for more than 60 percent of the agency’s workforce in New York City, according to estimates from 2016. 6park.com
Black people in particular are overrepresented in the MTA; they are 46 percent of the city’s transportation workers versus 24 percent of its overall population. (White people, on the other hand, make up 30 percent of local MTA employees but 43 percent of NYC residents.) 6park.com
This is, again, true across cities and sectors. As Devan Hawkins wrote in the Guardian, black Americans are more likely than white Americans to be employed in the essential services that have been exempted from state stay-at-home orders, and they are more likely to work in health care and in hospitals. In America as in other countries, health care workers make up a disproportionate share of Covid-19 cases. 6park.com
So the steps states and cities have taken to restrict public activities and slow the spread of the coronavirus, while undoubtedly necessary and productive, have still left people of color more exposed to infection and, ultimately, death during the pandemic. 6park.com
Those risks are exacerbated by long-standing health inequities in America. 6park.com
As Fabiola Cineas wrote for Vox last week, black Americans have historically had higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure than white Americans — all of which make a patient more vulnerable to developing a severe case of Covid-19 and ultimately dying. 6park.com
I would add that they are also more likely to be uninsured, again for both structural reasons (all the states in the Deep South except for Louisiana have refused to expand Medicaid, which disproportionately hurts black people) and because of the immediate crisis (black people were more likely to lose their job in the recent surge in unemployment). The same is true for Latinos. 6park.com

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