[News] Early Data Shows African Americans Have Contracted and Died of Coronavirus at an Alarming Rate

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.propublica.org/article/early-data-shows-african-americans-have-contracted-and-died-of-coronavirus-at-an-alarming-rate
Early
Data Shows African Americans Have Contracted and Died of Coronavirus at an
Alarming Rate

by Akilah Johnson <https://www.propublica.org/people/akilah-johnson> and Talia
Buford <https://www.propublica.org/people/talia-buford> - April 3,
------------------------------

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as soon as they’re published.

The coronavirus entered Milwaukee from a white, affluent suburb. Then it
took root in the city’s black community and erupted.

As public health officials watched cases rise in March, too many in the
community shrugged off warnings. Rumors and conspiracy theories
proliferated on social media, pushing the bogus idea that black people are
somehow immune to the disease
<https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/10/facebook-posts/melanin-doesnt-protect-against-coronavirus/>.
And much of the initial focus was on international travel, so those who
knew no one returning from Asia or Europe were quick to dismiss the risk.

Then, when the shelter-in-place order came, there was a natural pushback
among those who recalled other painful government restrictions — including
segregation and mass incarceration — on where black people could walk and
gather.

“We’re like, ‘We have to wake people up,’” said Milwaukee Health
Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik.

As the disease spread at a higher rate in the black community, it made an
even deeper cut. Environmental, economic and political factors have
compounded for generations, putting black people at higher risk of chronic
conditions that leave lungs weak and immune systems vulnerable: asthma,
heart disease, hypertension and diabetes. In Milwaukee, simply being black
means your life expectancy is 14 years shorter, on average, than someone
white.

As of Friday morning, African Americans made up almost half of Milwaukee
County’s 945 cases and 81% of its 27 deaths in a county whose population is
26% black. Milwaukee is one of the few places in the United States that is
tracking the racial breakdown of people who have been infected by the novel
coronavirus, offering a glimpse at the disproportionate destruction it is
inflicting on black communities nationwide.

In Michigan, where the state’s population is 14% black, African Americans
made up 35% of cases and 40% of deaths as of Friday morning. Detroit, where
a majority of residents are black, has emerged
<https://www.freep.com/story/news/health/2020/04/03/coronavirus-covid-19-cases-wayne-county-detroit-michigan/5116620002/>
as a hot spot with a high death toll. As has New Orleans. Louisiana has not
published case breakdowns by race, but 40% of the state’s deaths have
happened
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/louisiana-coronavirus-cases.html>
in Orleans Parish, where the majority of residents are black.

Illinois and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina — where Charlotte is — are
two of the few areas publishing statistics on COVID-19 cases by race, and
their data shows a disproportionate number of African Americans were
infected. Neither of those governments has published breakdowns of deaths
by race.

“It will be unimaginable pretty soon,” said Dr. Celia J. Maxwell, an
infectious disease physician and associate dean at Howard University
College of Medicine, a school and hospital in Washington dedicated to the
education and care of the black community. “And anything that comes around
is going to be worse in our patients. Period. Many of our patients have so
many problems, but this is kind of like the nail in the coffin.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks virulent
outbreaks and typically releases detailed data that includes information
about the age, race and location of the people affected. For the
coronavirus pandemic, the CDC has released location
<https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html>
and age data, but it has been silent on race. The CDC did not respond to
ProPublica’s request for race data related to the coronavirus or answer
questions about whether they were collecting it at all.

Experts say that the nation’s unwillingness to publicly track the virus by
race could obscure a crucial underlying reality: It’s quite likely that a
disproportionate number of those who die of coronavirus will be black.

The reasons for this are the same reasons that African Americans have
disproportionately high rates of maternal death, low levels of access to
medical care and higher rates of asthma, said Dr. Camara Jones, a family
physician, epidemiologist and visiting fellow
<https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/people/camara-phyllis-jones> at Harvard
University.

“COVID is just unmasking the deep disinvestment in our communities, the
historical injustices and the impact of residential segregation,” said
Jones, who spent 13 years at the CDC, focused on identifying, measuring and
addressing racial bias within the medical system. “This is the time to name
racism as the cause of all of those things. The overrepresentation of
people of color in poverty and white people in wealth is not just a
happenstance. … It’s because we’re not valued.”

Five congressional Democrats wrote to Health and Human Services Secretary
Alex Azar, whose department encompasses the CDC, last week demanding
<https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2020.03.27%20Letter%20to%20HHS%20re%20racial%20disparities%20in%20COVID%20response.pdf>
the federal government collect and release the breakdown of coronavirus
cases by race and ethnicity.

Without demographic data, the members of Congress wrote, health officials
and lawmakers won’t be able to address inequities in health outcomes and
testing that may emerge: “We urge you not to delay collecting this vital
information, and to take any additional necessary steps to ensure that all
Americans have the access they need to COVID-19 testing and treatment.”

Milwaukee, one of the few places already tracking coronavirus cases and
deaths by race, provides an early indication of what would surface
nationally if the federal government actually did this, or locally if other
cities and states took its lead.

Milwaukee, both the city and county, passed resolutions last summer that
were seen as important steps in addressing decades of race-based inequality.

“We declared racism as a public health issue,” said Kowalik, the city’s
health commissioner. “It frames not only how we do our work but how
transparent we are about how things are going. It impacts how we manage an
outbreak.”

Milwaukee is trying to be purposeful in how it communicates information
about the best way to slow the pandemic. It is addressing economic and
logistical roadblocks that stand in the way of safety. And it’s being
transparent about who is infected, who is dying and how the virus spread in
the first place.

Kowalik described watching the virus spread into the city, without enough
information, because of limited testing, to be able to take early action to
contain it.

At the beginning of March, Wisconsin had one case. State public health
officials still considered the risk from the coronavirus “low.” Testing
criteria was extremely strict, as it was in many places across the country:
You had to have symptoms and have traveled to China, Iran, South Korea or
Italy within 14 days or have had contact with someone who had a confirmed
case of COVID-19.

So, she said, she waited, wondering: “When are we going to be able to test
for this to see if it is in our community?”

About two weeks later, Milwaukee had its first case.

The city’s patient zero had been in contact with a person from a
neighboring, predominately white and affluent suburb who had tested
positive. Given how much commuting occurs in and out of Milwaukee, with
some making a 180-mile round trip to Chicago, Kowalik said she knew it
would only be a matter of time before the virus spread into the city.

A day later came the city’s second case, someone who contracted the virus
while in Atlanta. Kowalik said she started questioning the rigidness of the
testing guidelines. Why didn’t they include domestic travel?

By the fourth case, she said, “we determined community spread. … It
happened so quickly.”

Within the span of a week, Milwaukee went from having one case to nearly
40. Most of the sick people were middle-aged, African American men. By week
two, the city had over 350 cases. And now, there are more than 945 cases
countywide, with the bulk in the city of Milwaukee, where the population is
39% black. People of all ages have contracted the virus and about half are
African American.

The county’s online dashboard <https://county.milwaukee.gov/EN/COVID-19> of
coronavirus cases keeps up-to-date information on the racial breakdown of
those who have tested positive. As of Thursday morning, 19 people had died
of illness related to COVID-19 in Milwaukee County. All but four were
black, according to the county medical examiner’s office. Records show that
at least 11 of the deceased had diabetes, eight had hypertension and 15 had
a mixture of chronic health conditions that included heart and lung disease.

Because of discrimination and generational income inequality, black
households in the county earned only 50% as much as white ones in 2018,
according to census statistics. Black people are far less likely to own
homes than white people in Milwaukee and far more likely to rent, putting
black renters at the mercy of landlords who can kick them out if they can’t
pay during an economic crisis, at the same time as people are being told to
stay home. And when it comes to health insurance, black people are more
likely to be uninsured than their white counterparts.

African Americans have gravitated to jobs in sectors viewed as reliable
paths to the middle class — health care, transportation, government, food
supply — which are now deemed “essential,” rendering them unable to stay
home. In places like New York City, the virus’ epicenter, black people are
among the only ones still riding the subway
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/nyregion/coronavirus-mta-subway-riders.html>
.

“And let’s be clear, this is not because people want to live in those
conditions,” said Gordon Francis Goodwin, who works for Government Alliance
on Race and Equity <https://www.racialequityalliance.org/about/who-we-are/>,
a national racial equity organization that worked with Milwaukee
<https://www.racialequityalliance.org/jurisdictions/milwaukee-county/> on
its health and equity framework. “This is a matter of taking a look at how
our history kept people from actually being fully included.”

Fred Royal, head of the Milwaukee branch of the NAACP, knows three people
who have died from the virus, including 69-year-old Lenard Wells
<https://apnews.com/b52e4e9a63d64e3a25109f09010508b6>, a former Milwaukee
police lieutenant and a mentor to others in the black community. Royal’s
38-year-old cousin died from the virus last week in Atlanta. His body was
returned home Tuesday.

Royal is hearing that people aren’t necessarily being hospitalized but are
being sent home instead and “told to self-medicate.”

“What is alarming about that,” he said, “is that a number of those
individuals were sent home with symptoms and died before the confirmation
of their test came back.”

Health Commissioner Kowalik said that there have been delays of up to two
weeks in getting results back from some private labs, but nearly all of
those who died have done so at hospitals or while in hospice. Still,
Kowalik said she understood why some members in the black community
distrusted the care they might receive in a hospital.

In January, a 25-year-old day care teacher named Tashonna Ward died
<https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/01/11/after-waiting-froedtert-er-milwaukee-woman-leaves-and-later-dies/4422064002/>
after staff at Froedtert Hospital failed to check her vital signs. Federal
officials examined 20 patient records and found seven patients, including
Ward, didn’t receive proper care. The report didn’t reveal the race of
those whose records it examined at the hospital, which predominantly serves
black patients. Froedtert Hospital declined
<https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/02/25/milwaukee-woman-who-died-after-er-wait-wasnt-only-one-who-saw-delays/4857360002/>
to speak to issues raised in the report, according to a February article
from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and it had not submitted any
corrective actions to federal officials.

“What black folks are accustomed to in Milwaukee and anywhere in the
country, really, is pain not being acknowledged and constant inequities
that happen in health care delivery,” Kowalik said.

The health commissioner herself, a black woman who grew up in Milwaukee,
said she’s all too familiar with the city’s enduring struggles with
segregation and racism. Her mother is black and her father Polish, and she
remembers the stories they shared about trying to buy a house as a young
interracial couple in Sherman Park, a neighborhood once off-limits to
blacks.

“My father couldn’t get a mortgage for the house. He had to go to the bank
without my mom,” Kowalik said.

It is the same neighborhood
<https://projects.jsonline.com/topics/sherman-park/> where fury and
frustration sparked protests that, at times, roiled into riots in 2016 when
a Milwaukee police officer fatally shot Sylville Smith, a 23-year-old black
man.

And it is the same neighborhood that has a concentration of poor health
outcomes when you overlay a heat map of conditions, be it lead poisoning,
infant mortality — and now, she said, COVID-19.

Knowing which communities are most impacted allows public health officials
to tailor their messaging to overcome the distrust of black residents.

“We’ve been told so much misinformation over the years about the condition
of our community,” Royal, of the NAACP, said. “I believe a lot of people
don’t trust what the government says.”

Kowalik has met — virtually — with trusted and influential community
leaders to discuss outreach efforts to ensure everyone is on the same page
about the importance of staying home and keeping 6 feet away from others if
they must go out.

Police and inspectors are responding to complaints received about
“noncompliant” businesses forcing staff to come to work or not practicing
social distancing in the workplace. Violators could face fines.

“Who are we getting these complaints from?” she asked. “Many people of
color.”

Residents have been urged to call 211 if they need help with anything from
finding something to eat or a place to stay. And the state has set up two
voluntary isolation facilities for people with COVID-19 symptoms whose
living situations are untenable, including a Super 8 motel in Milwaukee.

Despite the work being done in Milwaukee, experts like Linda Sprague
Martinez, a community health researcher at Boston University’s School of
Social Work, worry that the government is not paying close enough attention
to race, and as the disease spreads, will do too little to blunt its toll.

“When COVID-19 passes and we see the losses … it will be deeply tied to the
story of post-World War II policies that left communities marginalized,”
Sprague said. “Its impact is going to be tied to our history and legacy of
racial inequities. It’s going to be tied to the fact that we live in two
very different worlds.”

*Doris Burke <https://www.propublica.org/people/doris-burke> and Hannah
Fresques <https://www.propublica.org/people/hannah-fresques> contributed
reporting.*
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