Racism is contributing to Covid-19’s ‘double blow’ on the black community, Fauci says

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Fauci noted that some black adults may not be able to socially distance themselves if they are essential workers, and there is a disproportionate prevalence of underlying conditions within the black community, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, chronic lung disease, and kidney disease.

“So unfortunately we have a situation where it’s kind of a double whammy,” Fauci said.

But also, “It is clear that the African American community has been suffering from racism for a very, very long time,” said Fauci. “I can’t imagine that that doesn’t contribute to the conditions they are in, economically or otherwise.”

This isn’t the first time Fauci has talked about Covid-19 affecting black Americans inordinately.

“African Americans have suffered disproportionately from the coronavirus disease. They have suffered because their infection rate is higher due to the nature of the economic status many of them are in where they work outside, because they cannot separate physically,” Fauci, de director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on the US Department of Health and Human Services podcast “Learning Curve”.

“And if they do get infected, given the social health determinants that make it … they have a higher incidence of diseases like hypertension, obesity, diabetes,” Fauci said. “They are at a much higher risk of suffering the harmful effects, including death.”

Social determinants of health include the conditions in which people are born and in which they live and which can affect their health, as well as the complex social structures and economic systems that determine these conditions, including discrimination in access to and quality of healthcare.

The coronavirus pandemic has made it clearer than ever that the United States must invest in communities – especially in ways that can reduce health inequalities, an expert on racial justice said last week.

The coronavirus pandemic is hitting black and brown Americans particularly hard on all fronts
“I think we need to think about more resources to address the issues that create inequalities and prevalence in susceptibility to coronavirus,” said David Harris, director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. a Facebook Live discussion.

“It’s the way that institutional racism, for want of a better word, permeates some very, very specific and special differences in treatment,” he said.

Addressing racism and Covid-19 in a speech on inequality and police crackdown on Thursday, Harris highlighted issues that have put black communities at a disadvantage as the pandemic continues.

“The coronavirus has revealed to us that we also need to invest massive amounts of resources in our communities,” Harris said.

“Even if we have a vaccine and we can survive the virus, we cannot forget the lesson the virus has taught us,” he added. “We still have to push for those resources.”

CNN’s Naomi Thomas contributed to this report.

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