NY TIMES
The coronavirus is infecting and killing black people in the United States at disproportionately high rates, according to data released by several states and big cities, highlighting what public health researchers say are entrenched inequalities in resources, health and access to care.
The statistics are preliminary and much remains unknown because most cities and states are not reporting race as they provide numbers of confirmed cases and fatalities. Initial indications from a number of places, though, are alarming enough that policymakers say they must act immediately to stem potential devastation in black communities.
The worrying trend is playing out across the country, among people born in different decades and working far different jobs.
“This is a call-to-action moment for all of us,” said Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, who announced statistics of the outbreak in her city this week. African-Americans account for more than half of those who have tested positive and 72 percent of virus-related fatalities in Chicago, even though they make up a little less than a third of the population. “Those numbers take your breath away, they really do,” said Ms. Lightfoot, who is the city’s first black woman elected as mayor. She added in an interview that the statistics were “among the most shocking things I think I’ve seen as mayor.”
In Illinois, 43 percent of people who have died from the disease and 28 percent of those who have tested positive are African-Americans, a group that makes up just 15 percent of the state’s population. African-Americans, who account for a third of positive tests in Michigan, represent 40 percent of deaths in that state even though they make up 14 percent of the population. In Louisiana, about 70 percent of the people who have died are black, though only a third of that state’s population is.
On the South Side of Chicago, LaShawn Levi, a medical assistant who rides the bus to work each day, turned to tea and cough syrup — “everything your grandma taught you” — to treat a headache and a cough. Ms. Levi, thinks that her daily bus ride to work could have been the source of her exposure. Or, she said, she could have picked it up in the hospital where she works, at the grocery store, or from food served to her.
Donations of personal protective equipment were collected to distribute to medical workers in Chicago.
North Carolina and South Carolina also have reported a ratio of black residents to white residents who have tested positive for the virus that well exceeds the general population ratio. Black people are overrepresented among those infected in the Las Vegas area and among people who have tested positive for the virus in Connecticut. In Minnesota, black people have been infected with the coronavirus at rates roughly proportionate to their percentage of the state’s population.
For many public health experts, the reasons behind the disparities are not difficult to explain, the result of longstanding structural inequalities. At a time when the authorities have advocated staying home as the best way to avoid the virus, black Americans disproportionately belong to part of the work force that does not have the luxury of working from home, experts said. That places them at high risk for contracting the highly infectious disease in transit or at work.
Longstanding inequalities also make African-Americans less likely to be insured, and more likely to have existing health conditions and face racial bias that prevents them from getting proper treatment. Many black residents live in segregated neighborhoods that lack job opportunities, stable housing, grocery stores with healthy food and more.
High levels of segregation in large urban counties lower the life expectancies of African-American residents but have little effect on the life expectancies of white residents, according to an analysis of the County Health Rankings by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Before the pandemic hit, officials had calculated that white Chicagoans had an average life expectancy of 8.8 years longer than black residents.
Initial indications are that doctors are less likely to refer African-Americans for testing when they visit a clinic with symptoms of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. The death toll has been particularly devastating among African-Americans.
One factor that might make the coronavirus more devastating for African-Americans is that they experience high levels of stress-mediated wear and tear known as “weathering,” said Arline Geronimus, a professor of public health at the University of Michigan who studies the concept.
Stresses like exposure to toxins, lack of sleep and racial discrimination, Dr. Geronimus said, can cause a kind of accelerated aging. The coronavirus is most lethal in people over 65.
NY TIMES
At least 41 transit workers have died, and more than 6,000 more have fallen sick or self-quarantined. Crew shortages have caused over 800 subway delays and forced 40 percent of train trips to be canceled in a single day. On one line the average wait time, usually a few minutes, ballooned to as high as 40 minutes.
Since the coronavirus pandemic engulfed New York City, it has taken a staggering toll on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the agency that runs the subway, buses and commuter rails and is charged with shuttling workers — like doctors, nurses and emergency responders — who are essential to keeping the city functioning.
But the transit agency may have deepened its work force crisis by not doing more during the early stages of the outbreak to protect its employees and delaying some steps laid out in a plan the M.T.A. had developed for dealing with a pandemic.
The transit agency was late to distribute disinfectant to clean shared work spaces, struggled to keep track of sick workers and failed to inform their colleagues about possible exposure to the virus, according to interviews with two dozen transit workers.
As the virus spread, many workers became so concerned that they took measures into their own hands: They cordoned off seats with duct tape to distance drivers from riders and used their own masks and homemade disinfectant at work, only to be reprimanded by supervisors.
Patrick J. Foye, the M.T.A. chairman, who himself tested positive for coronavirus, said the M.T.A. provided 460,000 masks to workers, in addition to thousands of face shields and 2.5 million pairs of gloves.
Still, around 1,500 transit workers have tested positive for the coronavirus, and 5,604 others have self-quarantined because they are showing symptoms of the infection. Absenteeism is up fourfold since the pandemic began, officials say.
Transit officials have repeatedly pledged to keep the system running as smoothly as possible to ferry people who continue to rely on public transit.
But already, the absences have crippled the agency’s ability to operate its sprawling public transit network, the largest in North America. It has been forced to slash service beyond what was laid out in its initial emergency plan, which reduced service by 25 percent at the end of March.
That plan also cut in half the number of workers needed each day, in an effort to help to promote social distancing in shared work spaces, officials say.
Now transit workers warn that the worsening staffing shortage will make it increasingly difficult to keep even a diminished system running. The authority is disinfecting train cars and buses every three days and has urged riders to wait for empty trains to mitigate the overcrowding problems caused by reduced service.
The M.T.A have also given out the 2.5 million pairs of gloves, hand sanitizer, cleaning supplies and sanitizing wipes to workers in recent weeks, officials said, and have eliminated cash transactions between booth clerks and riders. Still, safety concerns continue. With trains running less frequently, platforms and subway cars have become overcrowded at times, making social distancing impossible.
In March, bus drivers began cordoning off the front of their buses with tape and instructing riders to enter through the back door — a strategy the M.T.A. later formally adopted.
By the end of March, the virus had infiltrated the agency’s work force: On March 24, M.T.A. officials said 52 transit workers had been infected. A week later, the number jumped to 333, with seven workers dead.
The true number of sick workers was most likely higher than official counts, but the authority was having trouble keeping track.
The M.T.A. had set up a hotline for workers to report positive test results and to receive guidance on whether they should self-quarantine. But it had become so overwhelmed — with 7,000 to 8,000 calls per day — that it took some workers days to get through
In response to complaints, the agency increased the number of workers assigned to the hotline to 200, from 50. Now 95 percent of calls are answered, and average wait times on the line are about a minute, according to a transit agency spokeswoman.
With the agency initially struggling to notify workers about sick colleagues they might have been exposed to, employees came to rely on Facebook groups to share information. And as the pandemic rolled into its second month in New York, multiple posts reporting sicknesses or deaths were flooding in each day.
“We’re seeing a lot of our co-workers getting sick or dying. The morale is down. It is very, very bad,” said Nasar Abdurrahman, a bus operator. A colleague at his bus depot, Ernesto Hernandez, died from the virus at the end of March.
At one train terminal, every train dispatcher had fallen ill, leaving supervisors to take their place.Some employees stopped showing up altogether, opting to burn through their personal and vacation days.
Daniel Cruz, a bus operator who has worked at the M.T.A. for three years, tested positive for the coronavirus on March 29 — three days after he learned that a friend and colleague, Oliver Cyrus, had died from the virus. “I love my job, but I’m not looking forward to going back to work. I feel like we’ve been left to defend ourselves,” Mr. Cruz said. “At this point, we’re just transporting the virus.”