It looks like the coronavirus is taking a harder toll on Hispanic and black New Yorkers — thanks to issues that mostly can’t be addressed until the crisis is over.
Nationwide, the underlying issue seems to be a disparity in preexisting conditions, reports the US government’s top infectious-disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci: “It’s not that they are getting infected more often, it’s that when they do get infected, their underlying medical conditions — the diabetes, hypertension, the obesity, the asthma — those are the kind of things that wind them up in the ICU and ultimately give them a higher death rate.”
In the city, at least, blacks and Hispanics may well face greater exposure to the virus, since they’re likely a more-than-fair share of the essential workers still riding (and operating!) the subways and generally taking greater risks.
Fauci suggests the pandemic will “ultimately shine a very bright light on some of the real weaknesses and foibles in our society,” such that these issues will get the nation’s attention in the months ahead.
But the hard truth is that they’re extremely difficult to address.
Poverty, of course, drives much of the problem: Healthy eating takes more money — or more time, care and energy, which often comes down to the same thing. And awareness of the dangers tends to go along with higher incomes and higher education.
The Bronx has long ranked as the state’s least-healthy county in yearly lists from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. That prompted Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. to create the #Not62 campaign to improve health outcomes for the borough’s predominately Hispanic and black residents by targeting the underlying social, economic and environmental factors. But progress is painfully slow.
How aggressive should we go? This problem was the target of any of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s nanny-state policies, from his (fairly successful) drive to marginalize smoking to his (largely failed) efforts to ban Big Gulp sodas, discourage high-salt and high-fat diets and so on.
He even experimented (using private, not public, money) with bribing people into leading healthier lifestyles. None of it won him much popularity.
Nor does it help that prominent leaders like the Rev. Al Sharpton can be bought off by Big Tobacco to defend menthol cigarettes and vaping products against public-health efforts.
When it comes to disparities in public health, the “weaknesses and foibles in our society” are a lot more complicated than anything as simple as racial prejudice.