LA Times: ‘A crisis within a crisis’: Black Americans face higher rates of coronavirus deaths

NEW ORLEANS — At first, COVID-19 did not seem to discriminate. The patients who walked into Dr. Uché Blackstock’s urgent-care clinics in Brooklyn, N.Y., with coughs and fevers were white, black and brown.

But in the last few weeks, she has witnessed a notable shift: Fewer white people have showed up, while there has been a dramatic uptick in the number of black and brown patients.

Many are lower-income service workers and essential workers — delivery drivers, police officers, subway workers, corrections officers — who do not have the luxury of working from home or retreating to a second home in a less dense community.

“People say that COVID-19 is a great equalizer and that everyone’s going to be impacted,” said Blackstock, chief executive of Advancing Health Equity. “But the fact is that certain communities are more harshly impacted than others.”….

“This virus is treading a glide path that unfortunately our society has paved through structural racism and poverty,” said Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a former director of the Detroit Health Department. “It is finding its way into our most vulnerable communities, who in our country tend to be disproportionately black and brown.”

Read more at https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-04-07/a-crisis-within-a-crisis-black-americans-face-higher-rates-of-coronavirus-deaths