TAG D&I and Digital Health Present The Impact of COVID-19 of People of Color

Description

Within weeks of COVID-19’s emergence in the United States, its disproportionate devastation in Black communities became a leading story. Across the country, it remains a disease that is killing African Americans and Native Americans faster than others. Fifty thousand African Americans have died from COVID-19. Black people account for eighteen per cent of those who have died from COVID-19 complications, far higher than their thirteen per cent of the national population. Even in Alaska, African Americans are dying because of COVID-19 at a rate higher than their proportion in the state. But even as a vaccine has been produced in record time, bringing with it some sense that the end of the pandemic nightmare is even thinkable, African-

Americans have expressed the greatest skepticism about being vaccinated. The latest polls show that only forty-two per cent of Black people will seek out the vaccine immediately, compared to sixty-one per cent of Latinos and sixty-three per cent of whites. Read The New Yorker’s complete news coverage and analysis of the coronavirus pandemic. The skepticism among the Black public is not rooted in the same kind of anti-scientific sentiment that has motivated those small communities that reject vaccines in general. Instead, Black concerns are enmeshed within a history of Black health care that is replete with acts of cruelty and depravity and has caused Black communities to regard the health-care professions with warranted suspicion.

Source: Black America Has Reason to Question Authorities | The New Yorker