NOW MORE THAN ever in the US, your money defines you. If you’re rich, you’ve splurged on enough canned food and TP to ride out several pandemics, let alone Covid-19. As the start of the school year approaches, perhaps you’ve hired tutors for your kids. Maybe you’ve decamped to your country compound to hunker down and escape the masses. But if you’re poor, you may be stuck taking public transport to your essential job. Without much savings in the bank, you have to make frequent trips to the grocery story to get supplies little by little.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that scientists now have the data to show that Americans with low income have been more mobile during the pandemic than the wealthy, potentially exposing themselves to a greater risk of infection.
People have been talking about Covid-19 as a sort of equalizer: If you’re a human, you can get it. The virus is so vicious, sometimes the best health care that money can buy still isn’t enough to fend off death. Rich or poor, the virus doesn’t give a damn. But that’s conflating lethality (or how likely a person is to die from the virus) with exposure risk (or how likely a person is to be infected in the first place). “I'm not really sure where that came from, except that people always say this about catastrophes, and it's never true,” says Noymer. “Some people said, ‘Well, Tom Hanks can get it, and anyone can get it.’ But that doesn't mean that anyone will get it, or that or that Mr. Hanks and people in his tax bracket are equally likely to be affected by it.”
It’s critical to note that 43 percent of essential workers are people of color, says Chandra Farley, director of the Partnership for Southern Equity’s Just Energy program. “We sometimes automatically characterize people as vulnerable, without saying they are made to be more vulnerable to certain things because of systemic racism and historic inequities,” Farley says. “People are not low-income. People earn lower incomes because they’ve been marginalized, in a lot of cases, into earning low wages because of their essential work.”
Not all essential workers get health insurance from their jobs, and that’s another underlying factor in the disparities among who is most vulnerable to the virus. The Covid-19 mortality rate for Black Americans is 3.7 times higher than the rate for white Americans, due in large part to unequal access to health care. Latinx people are 2.5 times more likely to die of the disease than white people. In San Francisco, the divide is particularly stark: One study in the city's Mission neighborhood found that 96 percent of those who tested positive were Latinx, even though that group only accounted for 40 percent of participants. Fully 90 percent said they couldn't shelter in place at home. Continue here....
-- Matt Simon
