Ala Stanford speaks with doctors in Philadelphia who formed the Black Doctors Covid-19 Consortium to offer to test and help address health disparities in the African American community. (Matt Rourke/AP)
The study comes from Amfar, the Foundation for Aids Research, reports The Post’s Vanessa Williams. So, why are black people more likely to be harmed by the virus? The Fix’s Eugene Scott explained recently:
1.Black people have higher rates of hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and lung disease and less access to high-quality medical care to deal with it all. “A 2014 National Institutes of Health study found that hospitals in predominantly black neighborhoods are more likely to close down than those in predominantly white neighborhoods,” Scott writes.
2.Black Americans hold a lot of “essential jobs” that don’t allow them to stay home and telework, like bus drivers or gig economy workers or security guards.
3.A majority live in the South, and “states like Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia are all headed by governors whose messaging on how to stay safe was often inconsistent with the guidelines of the federal government,” Scott writes.
4.There are also housing disparities. “People of color are more likely to live in densely packed areas and in multigenerational housing situations, which create a higher risk for the spread of highly contagious disease like covid-19,” U.S. Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams said at a White House briefing last month.
But this is not just an urban issue. The new study found that the highest death rates among black Americans from the virus were in smaller metropolitan areas and rural communities.
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