From Mother Jones: COVID-19 Has Infected and Killed Black People At Alarming Rates. This Data Proves It.
Thanks to Jeff Wiggins for sending us this.
It's time for an "ethical reckoning."
By EDWIN RIOS and SINDUJA RANGARAJAN
The coronavirus deals out death and despair unequally across America. Scientifically speaking, the virus can infect anyone. But as epidemiologist Camara Jones recently told Mother Jones, “the disease discriminates in how profoundly those people are affected.”
In early April, Mother Jones began requesting racial and ethnic breakdowns of COVID-19 infections and deaths from health departments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Of those, 21 states released no racial or ethnic breakdowns of those infected. Twenty-six states failed to release breakdowns of fatalities by race, and among the states that did, the information was inconsistently formatted. Some broke out data only by race, others only by ethnicity, and some by both. Some offered data for Latinx and Asian communities; others classified them as “Other.” Most states had little if any information about how Latinx, Asian, and Native American populations have been affected.