The need for better data remains.īut data alone are not enough. federal government has no such system in place, and journalists and scholars have stepped in to collate disaggregated data by race from a patchwork of state health departments. Despite calls for comprehensive, nationwide data on COVID‐19 cases and deaths by race and socioeconomic status, the U.S. This inequity-as appalling as it is-may still underestimate the problem, as data remain woefully incomplete. When adjusted for age, the risk of death from COVID‐19 is as much as nine times higher for African Americans than it is for whites (Bassett, Chen, & Krieger, 2020). During the entire course of the pandemic so far, data compiled by the non‐profit APM Research Lab ( 2020) has shown that the crude death rate for Black Americans is more than double that for all other racialized groups. By early April, evidence began to emerge in the United States-first in Milwaukee, then in Detroit, eventually everywhere data were disaggregated by race-that mortality from COVID‐19 was disproportionately affecting Black people and communities (Johnson & Buford, 2020). Soon, that stark reality became clear to all. Pandemics always follow the fault lines of society-exposing and often magnifying power inequities that shape population health even in normal times (Wade, 2020).
For a brief moment, in the early days of COVID‐19, some reports heralded the new coronavirus, SARS‐CoV‐2, as a “great equalizer.” It is unlikely that any anthropologist, human biologist, historian, or public health scientist found this idea tempting.
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