In HealthPoint’s King County home, as elsewhere in the United States, anyone can contract COVID-19. But, as elsewhere in our country, the virus’s burden of sickness and death is falling disproportionately on communities of color.
As of mid-May, Public Health Seattle & King County had found that Latinx/Hispanic, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders, and Blacks had significantly higher rates of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations compared to whites. For the Latinx community, death rates followed the same grim pattern. While the total number of deaths from COVID-19 remained highest among whites, in the Latinx community the death rate per 100,000 residents was more than double that of whites.
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t surprise me,” says Magda Herrera de Leon, business director of HealthPoint’s Midway health center, which counts a large Latinx community and a growing number of refugees from African countries among its patient population. “It’s shocking and upsetting, but it’s also confirming what we’ve known all along: resources are still disproportionately distributed.”
Why communities of color are at risk
As a community health center, HealthPoint has a long tradition of serving communities of color. About a third of HealthPoint’s patients are Latinx/Hispanic, a category that includes about 10 percent of King County’s residents as a whole. Blacks are more than 17 percent of HealthPoint’s patients and just over 6 percent of the county’s residents. Nearly 5 percent of HealthPoint patients are Hawaiian Natives/Pacific Islanders, compared with a county population of about 1 percent.
Disparities in healthcare based on race and ethnicity have long been noted by researchers in the United States. The reasons behind the differences are numerous, complex, and starkly illustrated by the experience of COVID-19. During the pandemic, says Magda, one big reason for the disparity is a lack of options for Midway’s patients to just stay home.
People of color disproportionately work in service jobs deemed essential, occupations such as drivers, grocery store employees, construction and agricultural workers. “Even if I know I should stay home,” says Magda, “if I work in an essential service, I can’t just telecommute.”
Often in the Latinx community, she continues, “grandma is childcare.” That puts elders at risk, and if an extended family lives together in a smaller home, isolating anyone who gets sick is difficult if not impossible. Further, if people are undocumented, they aren’t eligible for federal programs such as stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, and food stamps to provide a financial cushion. And poor access to healthy food and opportunities for exercise in neighborhoods where many people of color live contribute to higher levels of the chronic health conditions that put them at increased risk for severe COVID-19.
“When you start naming all the factors,” says Magda, “you see that they just multiply, one on top of the other.”
“We’re all in this together”
When Magda talks to people in her community about the pandemic, she notices a common response to COVID-19: resilience.
“In the middle of everything,” she says, “people are not giving up.”
Though the burden falls heavier on minorities, the pandemic also is an equalizer of sorts. Because nearly all of us are at risk for getting the virus as well as passing it on to each other, concern for our own health overlaps with concern for the health of others.
In other words, “If they’re not healthy, we’re not healthy,” says Magda. “We’re all in this together.”
Next: Addressing health disparities during the coronavirus pandemic
