World
- New Cases: 660,211 (⬆︎ 1.15%)
- New Deaths: 11,094 (⬆︎ .87%)
USA
- New Cases: 201,434 (⬆︎ 1.67%) 🥳 New Record!! 🎉
- New Deaths: 1,956 (⬆︎ .76%)
Over 150,000 New Cases in USAmerica Inc for 5 days in a row.
And the best predictive indicator for whether or not you're going to get fucked worse than the rest of us here in USAmerica Inc? Brown skin.
Racial, ethnic minorities continue to die from covid-19 at much higher rates
While overall fatality rates have plummeted since the spring, experts say many of the deaths in minority communities are preventable
Dennis Bannister’s daughter, Demi, was the first to die.
She was only 28, a beloved third-grade teacher who likely caught the virus during a training at her Columbia, S.C., school district. Doctors diagnosed her with a bladder infection, and by the time they realized their mistake, it was too late. Not long after, the family’s matriarch, Shirley, 57, complained of difficulty breathing. She was twice sent home from the emergency room before returning by ambulance and being put on a ventilator. She died soon after.
Which left Dennis Bannister, childless and a widower, sitting on his porch last month, staring at the last of the green leaves and mourning. Why, he pondered, had the virus hit his family so hard, and not just them, but so many African Americans? Was there something that made them particularly vulnerable? Had they gotten the right care?
“Folks think maybe they saw an African American coming in, and they didn’t take them seriously,” reflected Bannister, who was also infected but asymptomatic. “I don’t know. I just pray God will help me find a way to deal with the situation.”
It’s not just grieving relatives who are demanding answers. Nearly nine months after the virus exploded in the United States, and amid big treatment strides, the disease continues to ravage African American and other minority communities with a particular vengeance. Black, Asian, Native American and Hispanic patients still die far more frequently than White patients, even as death rates have plummeted for all races and age groups, according to a Washington Post analysis of records from 5.8 million people who tested positive for the virus from early March through mid-October.
Death rates overall have fallen more than 80 percent from the pandemic’s peak in the spring, when refrigerator trucks were parked outside New York City hospitals and ice rinks were converted into morgues, according to an analysis of anonymized data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But as another wave of infections sweeps across the country this fall, losses among racial and ethnic minorities remain disproportionately large. Black Americans were 37 percent more likely to die than Whites, after controlling for age, sex and mortality rates over time. Asians were 53 percent more likely to die; Native Americans and Alaskan Natives, 26 percent more likely to die; Hispanics, 16 percent more likely to die. Those higher case fatality rates for diagnosed people of color are on top of the increased infection rates for those unable to isolate at home because they are essential workers.
These patterns have devastated communities of color across the country: multigenerational Latino households in Texas, Pacific Islander families in Washington state, African American families in South Carolina.
Advocacy groups, researchers and other experts say many of these deaths are preventable, and they blame federal, state and local leaders for failing to take the disparities seriously and take steps to address them.
The shortage of testing in communities of color, which made headlines in the beginning, persists to this day. Despite their symptoms, for instance, neither Demi Bannister, nor her mother, Shirley, were tested for the virus until they were close to death in late August and September.
Critics also point to spotty race data, which has made disparities harder to identify and solve; weak enforcement of protocols like mask-wearing and social distancing at essential workplaces; delays in translating critical health alerts into other languages; conflicting guidance from health agencies that deepened distrust in some communities; economic and cultural factors that lead more families to live in multigenerational homes; and immigration policies that exacerbate crowded housing and discourage people from seeking medical care.
“It is a perfect storm that has been created that led to the deaths of groups of people,” said Elena Rios, head of the National Hispanic Medical Association.
Juliet Choi, chief executive of the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum, said many of the measures sought by minority groups to mitigate the effects of the virus on their communities are easy to implement and inexpensive, but they have been mostly ignored.
“It comes down to political will and commitment,” Choi said. “We’re not asking that decades of systemic barriers get eliminated overnight, but there are many simple things we should be doing that we are not doing.”
There is growing evidence that such changes do make a difference. Faced with extreme disparities in covid-19 deaths, Michigan officials undertook a series of steps, from boosting testing to connecting people of color with primary care doctors. The state’s rapid progress proves the issues are neither intractable, nor rooted somehow in biology.
Garlin Gilchrist II, a Detroit native as well as the state’s lieutenant governor, formed one of the nation’s first state racial disparities task forces on covid-19 back in April. Made up of 23 community organizers, doctors and other experts, the group focused not only on boosting testing and contact tracing, but also tailoring messages on mask-wearing and other public health precautions to African American communities. It also addressed broader systemic issues, such as access to primary care, and helping those in rural areas access telemedicine.
When state epidemiologists ran the numbers again in September, they found a huge change: Black residents who in April accounted for 29.4 percent of cases and 40.7 percent of deaths now made up only 8 percent of cases and 10 percent of deaths — very similar to their percentage in the population.
Gilchrist emphasized the state’s efforts have not been complicated. “I think the reason we have been able to make progress is we chose to focus on it,” he said.
They chose to focus on it.
"The System" treats people horribly - like numbers, or like stock items, or like a resource to be used and then discarded. And the fact that we treat POC even worse than we treat the average white guy shows just how shitty we've allowed this whole thing to become.
I don't like thinking in terms of Silver Linings - the only reason people talk about "there's always a silver lining" is that silver linings come wrapped in dark clouds of suffering and death - and lately those disasters can be traced back to the stoopid way we conduct ourselves.
So even though some good may yet come of this fucked up mess, maybe we could skip the fucked-up-mess part next time(?)
Stop making the clouds and we won't have to buck each other up, trying to stay cheery in the midst of catastrophes created by the avarice of small men with big ambitions. We can stop having to just dream of better days ahead, and start living in them. Could we try that for a while?
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