Over the past week, both individuals and organizations have publicly requested that states release the statistics that show which communities are being hit the hardest by COVID-19. New York Times journalist Charles M. Blow is one of them. In a call to action on his Instagram account — which received nearly 20,000 views — he encouraged leaders and citizens to “demand the release of race-specific COVID-19 data for New York City.” His request prompted a quick response, allowing him to post the racial demographics on Twitter shortly after.
Racism and bias in the health care system may be fueling it.
During Fauci’s press conference, he quoted and agreed with Deborah Birx, response coordinator for the White House coronavirus task force, that it’s less about how many black Americans have coronavirus and more about how they’re responding. “It’s not that [African-Americans] are getting infected more often, it’s that when they do get infected, their underlying medical conditions — diabetes, hypertension, obesity, asthma — those are the kind of things that wind them up in the ICU and ultimately give him a higher death rate,” said Fauci.
However, many say there are more factors at play. Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Lawsaid in a statement to Yahoo Lifestyle, “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 health care.”
The committee expanded on the concept in its letter to the HHS and CDC. “Systemic racism and bias in the healthcare system have resulted in chronically poor health outcomes for Black Americans, including higher rates of asthma, high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes,” the letter reads. “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.”
Lack of access to testing may also be a contributing factor.
On a call with Yahoo Lifestyle, Uché Blackstock, MD, a New York emergency physician and founder/CEO of Advancing Health Equity, expanded on the issues of unequal access to testing and paid time off. “I have seen in my exam rooms, mostly black and brown patients who are essential workers and service workers who cannot afford to stay home. These are the ones that I see presenting to the clinic with COVID-19 symptoms.”
Furthermore, she says, “Widespread testing isn’t accessible to these patients … and we already know that our health care system is embedded with bias. We have data already that [shows] black patients are likely to receive worse care from the minority-serving hospitals in their areas that are ill-equipped for dealing with COVID 19 patients.”
Clarke agrees, saying, “Only 20 percent of black workers in the country are able to work from home, compared to roughly one-third of their white counterparts. African-American communities face a higher degree of risk exposure. Private COVID-19 testing is cost-prohibitive, making it very difficult for low-income communities and particularly people of color to get tested.”
Not enough states are making data available to the public.
Although racial demographics are typically released during health crises, the CDC is not currently publicly reporting racial or ethnic demographic data for COVID-19 cases or tests performed across the country. However, the CDC is trying to correct this, requesting this critical information from health departments through the COVID-19 case report form “to track the impact of the outbreak and inform public health response.” The Lawyers’ Committee’s call to action “urges the federal and state agencies to begin publicly reporting this information immediately.”
Transparency is critical to ensuring equal access to healthcare.
Clarke of the Lawyers’ Committee said: “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. To fully confront this pandemic, we must ensure that communities of color receive equitable health care and treatment during this crisis. Comprehensive and publicly available racial data is a necessary weapon in the fight to confront COVID-19.”
Blackstock said, “The importance of being able to collect racial-ethnic demographic data in this pandemic is that we will be able to see which groups are going to be most harshly affected, and we already have preliminary data on that, but we need to know in order to allocate health care resources most equitably.”
By Kamilah Newton
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