CBS News
It's what I call a double whammy against the minority, but particularly the African American and Latinx community. You don't like to generalize, but as a demographic group, the African American community is more likely to be in a job that does not allow them to stay at home and do teleworking most of the time, they're in essential jobs. I mean, obviously, there are a lot of African Americans who are not, that could just as easily do that. But as a broad demographic group, you're outside, you're exposed. You may be in a financial or economic or employment situation where you don't have as much control over physical separation, which is one of the ways that you prevent infection. So the likelihood of your getting infected is more than the likelihood of someone not in your position. The other side of the coin — and this has a lot to do with long-term social determinants of health — as a demographic group, African Americans have disproportionately greater incidents of the underlying conditions that allow you to have a more unfavorable outcome, namely more serious disease, hospitalization and even death. That is, diseases like diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, obesity, chronic kidney disease. If you look at populations as a whole, and you look at the demographic group of African Americans and the demographic group of the rest of the population, or Caucasian, what you see is a much greater incidence. So you have two things going against you: You are physically in a position that's more likely you're going to get infected, and if you do get infected, you're more likely to have a serious outcome.