African Americans struggle with disproportionate COVID death toll

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Coronavirus is ravaging every part of Warren Bell’s life in New Orleans. His 81-year-old cousin was hospitalized with COVID-19. His youngest daughter is furloughed from her culinary job at a major hotel because of the pandemic. His oldest daughter, a nurse, is doing 12-hour shifts at New Orleans East Hospital “where COVID-19 patients started dying weeks ago.”

“One of the nursing staff died over a week ago and her supervisor was on quarantine. So naturally, I worry every day about her,” says Bell, a former TV news anchor and radio host. A football coach at the school where his wife works, and a long-time friend, jazz patriarch Ellis Marsalis, recently died from the disease. “This is scary stuff,” he says.

In urban centers large and small across the U.S., the novel coronavirus is devastating African American communities. The environments where most live, the jobs they have, the prevalence of health conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes, and how they are treated by the medical establishment have created a toxic storm of severe illness and death. (These common, underlying conditions make coronavirus more severe.)

In cities, counties, and states that are reporting racial data, the impact of coronavirus on the black community has been extraordinary and disproportionate. Almost one-third of infections nationwide have affected black Americans, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control, though blacks represent only 13 percent of the U.S. population. Likewise, nearly one-third of those who have died across the country are black, according to an analysis of available state and local data by the Associated Press.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/04/coronavirus-disproportionately-impacts-african-americans/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=SpecialEdition_20200424&rid=FB26C926963C5C9490D08EC70E179424

[SlimJimmy]

1. The comorbidities are hitting the AA community especially hard.

This virus seems to thrive on those with underlying conditions.

[ck4829]

5. Especially that institutional racism

[Snake Plissken]

2. I've been thinking a lot about this lately and I believe from a statistical standpoint ...

what it comes down to is the concentration of social interaction based on economic factors.

African Americans tend to be far less socially isolated on a day to day basis than White people, based on dwelling and transportation data.

This virus is spreading person to person, so it will spread exponentially higher in an area where people live in multi family dwellings such as apartment buildings and will spread exponentially higher among people who use public transportation than in areas where people live in single family houses that are spread apart and drive their own vehicles.

If one person in living in a single family dwelling who drives their own car becomes infected, only the members of the household are in danger which is 3 or 4 people, but if a person in a apartment complex gets it, the entire apartment complex is in danger, let's say 100 people, and now multiply that by the twenty or thirty other people on the bus or the train they use and it goes from spreading it to 3 or 4 people in you live in the suburbs and drive your own car to spreading it to 3,000 or 4,000 people in an urban area and use mass transit.

Of course there are other factors, but I believe a bulk of cases will be based along these lines. When you look at a map of New York and Connecticut, the communities hit the hardest correspond almost identically to the mass transit lines, specifically the subway and train lines, and consequently there are a large number of African Americans living in those locations, thus exposing them the most to this pandemic.

[ck4829]

3. K&R

[crickets]

4. K&R for visibility.