The New Yorker: Let’s Protect and Reward Workers Who Are Keeping America Going
By JOHN CASSIDY
If the fight to contain the coronavirus is a war, as Donald Trump and other politicians keep saying, it is a war in which working-class Americans, many of them members of minority groups, are suffering a disproportionate share of the casualties. This became clear early in the outbreak, and it still holds true.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control released a study from Georgia that showed that more than eighty per cent of the people hospitalized with covid-19 in that state are African-American. Here in New York City, a similarly skewed pattern can be seen. In affluent (and mostly white) parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, there are fewer than ten confirmed cases of covid-19 per thousand residents, whereas in many poor (and mostly non-white) parts of the city the infection rate is more than twenty-five per thousand residents. (I took these figures from a very useful interactive map created by Ben Huff, a contributor to the Web site Untapped New York.)