How Covid-19 exposed America’s brutal inequalities
When a person tests positive for Covid-19 in the US, they are told to stay at home and monitor their symptoms. If they do become severely ill, they are likely to endure a long waiting time for medical attention, and there is no guarantee they will receive treatment at a hospital or be put on a ventilator. And not everyone can afford the treatment costs. With Covid-19 tests costing up to $2,315 (£1,748), many are unable to afford being diagnosed in the first place.
On October 2, 2020, US President Donald Trump announced that he had tested positive for Covid-19. On the same day, he was transported to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center by helicopter to be monitored around the clock by an expert medical team. He received treatments of antiviral drugs, steroids and the unapproved experimental antibody REGN-COV2, before being discharged just three days later on October 5. The New York Times estimates that Trump’s treatment would have cost over $100,000 (£77,042) in the American healthcare system. The stark contrast between Trump’s experience with the virus and the average American’s has shone a light on America’s vast landscape of inequality. Structural inequalities have created health and economic disparities that make racial minorities, women and low-wage workers disproportionately vulnerable to dying from the coronavirus. These same inequalities are being exacerbated, and arguably exploited, by the country’s political response to the pandemic.
Nationally, the Kaiser Family Foundation has found the Covid-19 death rate to be more than twice as high for Black patients and almost twice as high for Native American and Native Alaskan patients. In Kansas, Blacks are seven times more likely to die from the virus than white Kansans. In Michigan, black residents made up around 40 percent of coronavirus deaths as of April 9, even though they make up only about 14 percent of the population. Majority of frontline healthcare workers are female, including nine out of ten nurses. In April, 55 percent of those who lost their jobs were women. And the domestic and child-minding burdens of quarantine measures have been disproportionately shouldered by women. Essential workers, who largely have low-income salaries, are obliged to risk their lives by showing up for work every day, but are simultaneously six times more likely to lose their job than those in white-collar jobs. This stands in contrast to employees in highly-paid jobs and service based sectors that have been far more equipped to shelter-in-place and work from home. Many wealthy citizens living in populous cities, such as New York and Boston, fled to their second homes in rural areas at the onset of the pandemic, a privilege of movement not attainable by the masses. The deep entrenchment of these inequalities in American society means many of these factors are conflated, producing large gulfs in the way the virus has impacted such communities.
On the contrary, wealthy citizens who were against lockdown measures were also more equipped to afford costly medical bills in the event that they did fall ill. This empowered many to blatantly ignore, and even advocate against lockdowns and social distancing guidelines, without bearing the brunt of the consequences. Anti-mask movements, which have been substantial in both the US and the UK, have been largely helmed by white, middle-class or above individuals, who are statistically at lower risk of dying should they contract the virus. Yet many politicians, including New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, have characterised the virus as an “equaliser” that willingly ravages the lungs of any person, regardless of their skin colour, nationality, gender or financial status. The Trump administration compounded this claim by stating that black American’s high death rate is primarily due to the prevalence of diabetes, hypertension, obesity and other underlying health conditions within their communities. Trump has reasoned that this meant that the virus “affects virtually nobody”, dismissing the nation’s high Covid-19 death toll - the highest of any country in the world.
However, it is clear that these trends are far more systematic than the administration has portrayed. Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who both contracted Covid-19, are both above 50 years old and overweight - an at-risk category for coronavirus deaths. But their access to top-tier medical expertise and precautionary hospitalisation likely accelerated their recovery. Many point out that Covid-19 manifests in each individual to vastly different severities, and furthermore, the privileged treatment of political leaders is perhaps understandable given their prominence. Nonetheless, the grotesque impact of the pandemic on disadvantaged demographics underscore the devastating consequences of America’s underlying economic and health inequalities. The Trump administration’s bungled response to combat the virus, furthered by its preoccupation with justifying high death tolls with factors such as pre-existing health conditions and old age verges on victim-blaming.
Trump consistently refused to endorse mandatory mask-wearing, a measure that was carried out effectively in many other countries, and a step that experts estimate could have saved around 65,000 of the lives lost. He proceeded to spread multiple unfounded claims, such as suggesting disinfectant and the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as remedies to the virus, peddling misinformation that has misled citizens to drop their guard and state leaders to precipitously reopen economies. When Trump returned from Walter Reed to the White House, he proclaimed on Twitter: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life”. Holding Americans responsible for their disadvantaged circumstances in a country grounded in inequality has enabled the administration to absolve themselves of their duty to proactively fight the virus, and accomplished little but allow nationwide death tolls to continue to skyrocket.
Bringing things closer to home, the impact of racial and economic disparities in the UK have also taken toll. British people of Pakistani or Bangaldeshi heritage are the most likely to work in sectors affected by the coronavirus shutdown, and Black people, who are a large percentage of our nation’s essential workers, have contracted COVID -19 at far-above-average rates. Many economically deprived areas in the Midlands, West Yorkshire and the North East are among the worst hit, underscoring Britain’s deep geographic inequality - the highest of any rich nation in the world. Furthermore, the UK government was slow to recognise the risks of the virus, initially advocating for “herd immunity” as the approach to defeating the virus - a strategy that would require around 46 million Britons to contract Covid-19 before it could work. This would likely have resulted in an unimaginable number of deaths clustered in underprivileged communities.
As the world continues to struggle in the fight against Covid-19, the impact of the pandemic will likely remain concentrated amongst those who were already disadvantaged before the virus hit. A failure to acknowledge and rectify such grievous inequalities in a time of crisis has unveiled segments of society, and even governments, that are devoid of empathy. The inadequate, delayed and at times irresponsible response of political leadership, with the Trump administration in particular, have magnified disparities that predated the pandemic to an alarming degree. Unless the country acts now to remedy the inequalities and inequities that made them vulnerable in the first place, it is distressing what the long-term impacts of the pandemic will be.
Image courtesy of Charles Deluvio via Unsplash, ©2020, some rights reserved.
