I’m just taking a wild guess here, but my best bet is that if you could zero in on any typical American city right now, large or small, with a telescope, you wouldn’t see anything that resembles the reality that an illness spread around the world in 2020, that killed millions of people worldwide. Right about now, it’s almost as if the Coronavirus, later to be called Covid-19, never happened.
Covid was so bad that very quickly it was officially designated as a Pandemic that struck the world. Nonetheless, there are still some people out here who want to say that Covid isn’t real, that the government made it all up. That’s just cray cray–in my humble opinion. Covid is real and I have friends and associates who are still getting diagnosed with positive cases of Covid. (These are all fully vaccinated people, mind you). It’s not over.
I spoke with Dr. Cameron Webb, one of the members of the White House Covid-19 Response Team, and here’s what he had to say about Covid and the Black community.
“Things are certainly looking better from where they were in the eeriest days of the pandemic. We had enormous inequities in terms of who’s dying from Covid. During the worst part of the pandemic, African Americans were dying at 4-times the rate of whites from Covid. That’s three to four times the rate of white individuals. Some of the estimates from our CDC data indicate that African Americans were dying at 2.5 times the rates of white individuals nationally. Now, it’s down to 1.5 times that of whites, with Covid. We still see excess death in communities of color, but the numbers have significantly dropped. Part of the reason why we continue to see excess deaths again is tragic because of the fact that we carry a creative burden of chronic disease. Because the social determinants of health descend on communities of color, in a different way, because of access to health care.”
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