When National Institutes of Health [NIH} Chief of Allergy and Infectious disease 80-year-old Anthony Fauci admitted April 6 that African Americans were hit especially hard by cororavirus AKA CoV-2 or Covid-19 epidemic, he talked about disparities in racial communities. Fauci vowed that after the coronavirus crisis was over, NIH and the Center f or Disease Control [CDC] would spend more research working on the problem of minority health cares. While that’s all well-and-good, there’s nothing Fauci or any other infectious disease doctors can do to stop the way disease impacts the U.S. minority population. Speaking on CBS’s “Face The Nation” today, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot confirmed that 70% of Covid-19 deaths have been African Americans, despite the fact they’re only 30% of the population. “This is an issue that is not unique to Chicago, unfortunately,” Lightfoot said.
Lightfoot raises important sociocultural factors affecting the Black community in Chicago and other cities in the Midwest and Northeast. “The underlying conditions that people of color, particularly black folks, suffer from, including disproportionate amounts of diabetes, respiratory illness and heart disease,” Lightfoot said. Lightfoot raises a real dilemma in battling the SARS CoV-2 outbreak in major cities in the U.S. where poverty, homelessness and disease wreak havoc in minority populations. However many residents of inner cities die from coronvirus, more die from the effects of poverty, including gun and gang violence, disease, drug addiction and alcoholism. If inner cities lose their industry, wracking up high levels of unemployment, it’s going to make today’s intolerable conditions even worse. That’s why 73-year-old President Donald Trump must weigh opening up the economy sometime soon.
Shutting down the economy, forcing America’s working class to “shelter in place,” unable to work helps slow the virus from spreading, but spreads more poverty, crime and despair in the inner cities. “The kind of things that we‘ve been talking about for a long time, that plague black Chicago, that lead to life expectancy gaps, this virus attacks those underlying conditions with a vengeance,” Lightfoot said. When Trump meets with his “Open Up The Economy Task Force, coronavirus mitigation efforts, including shelter-in-place orders will have to be weighted against getting people back to work. Wall Street hasn’t yet reacted to dramatic rise in unemployment and drop in Gross Domestic Product [GDP] that’s bound to upend the stock market. Whatever happens on Wall Street, it pales in comparison when it comes to Main Street where voters face long unemployment lines.
Health care experts don’t consider the impact of shutting down the economy on health care, including infectious disease, poverty, homelessness, gang violence and malnutrition. Stopping the spread of the coronavirus is all that Fauci or State Department immunologist Dr. Deborah Birx talk about, not the collateral damage to vulnerable communities, like Blacks, Latinos, and most forgotten of all, Native Americans, who suffer disproportionately their share of health and social issues. When Trump’s “Open the Economy” Task Force meets in the coming weeks, they’ll have to weigh far more than new cases, hospitalizations, ventilators, protective gear, new treatments and deaths. Lightfoot raises the real problems with shutting down the U.S. economy for minority communities, adding to the unemployment, poverty, disease, drug addiction, gang violence and urban decay.
St. Louis Health Director Dr. Fredrick Echois confirmed that all 12 Covid-19 deaths Wednesday were African Americans, attesting to the havoc wreaked on poor communities by SARS CoV-2. “The coronavirus pandemic has brought to light what many health care providers in the St. Louis region already know: The communities with the highest health disparities and lack of access to heath care will be hit the hardest by Covid-19,” Echois wrote in the St. Louis American, a journal covering the Black community. African American 44-year-old Surgeon General Jerome Adams got his share of criticism for asking Black Americans to set aside their alcohol, smoking and drugs to help combat the cornonavirus crisis. Adams said he knew of nothing gentetically that predisposed African Americans to more coronavirus infections, disease and death, only higher prevalence of chronic medical conditions.
Trump’s got a tall order to fill dealing with the mass hysteria covering the current coronavirus outbreak, prompting the nations governors and mayors to issue shelter-in-place orders, preventing small and large businesses from operating. When you consider everything that goes with unemployment and poverty, including malnutrition, drug abuse, alcoholism, domestic abuse, gun and gang violence, poor heath care, higher prevalence of chronic diseaes, you’d think that Fauci and Birx would see the economy as part of the health care system. Highlighting data showing the Black community taking the brunt of the infections and deaths from the SARS CoV-2 epidemic should remind medical experts that heath is inextricably tied to a healthy economy. Letting the economy lapse into another Great Depression harms minority communities far worse than any infectious disease crisis.
