The first thing I learned was that the virus is not new and that folks knew about this virus long before it was announced to the public.
COVID-19 is a well-defined disease
While “we’ve come a long way,” there are still “a lot of holes in our knowledge” of COVID-19, said Dr. Bauchner. However, the “virus has been very well defined. It’s been very well defined since early January.
“The entire DNA sequence was laid out by the Chinese in the public domain and that’s critically important so you can develop diagnostic tests and begin to do vaccine and other drug development,” he said, adding “that was a huge advance” and that Anthony Fauci, MD, “has said it’s a key knowledge transfer that then allows vaccine development to begin.” https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/letting-science-speak-lessons-learned-covid-19
I've also learned that we have the resources in this country to do what we want to do and that a lot of this saying that we don't have the money os smoke in the air. We have the money now does that mean that much of the money we are spending to deal with the virus will be available because people will die from the virus sadly yes but the government never hesitated to release trillions of dollars to handle this virus
There is tremendous capacity in the U.S.
“We’ve learned that the U.S. has tremendous capacity to expand resources when necessary,” he said. This is because intensive care units around the country have doubled or tripled in size.
“The early concerns about a tremendous ventilator shortage has not occurred and that’s in part because we were able to obtain more ventilators,” said Dr. Bauchner. “But more importantly, people began to share them.”
Learn more about treatment strategies from the front lines of COVID-19 care in California, including freeing up ventilators. I have also come to see that the same game of poverty and racism is still in effect even when we are all suffering African Americans and Black Americans suffer more Dr. Maybank on Oprah Talks: AMA Chief Health Equity Officer and Vice President Aletha Maybank, MD, MPH, was featured on a special presentation of Oprah Talks on Apple TV+ to discuss the effects the COVID-19 pandemic is having on African-Americans across the country. The full episode aired on OWN at 11 p.m. ET. Episode segments:
—Social Racism and COVID-19: Dr. Maybank on Oprah Talks "When America catches a cold, black folks catch pneumonia."
Growing up in Denmark, South Carolina, my father, Cleveland Sellers Jr., would regularly repeat this notion to offer much-needed perspective in different policy discussions throughout the years. And time and time again, my father's evergreen sentiments have proven to be correct.
Growing up in Denmark, South Carolina, my father, Cleveland Sellers Jr., would regularly repeat this notion to offer much-needed perspective in different policy discussions throughout the years. And time and time again, my father's evergreen sentiments have proven to be correct.
The destructive impact brought on by the coronavirus pandemic is being felt in every corner of America. Each day, our lives and livelihoods hang in the balance as millions of Americans file for unemployment and friends and loved ones die by the hour. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/14/opinions/surgeon-general-comments-covid-19-black-communities-sellers/index.html
COVID-19 was called the great equalizer. Nobody was immune; anybody could succumb. But the virus’ spread across the United States is exposing racial fault lines, with early data showing that African-Americans are more likely to die from the disease than white Americans.
The data are still piecemeal, with only some states and counties breaking down COVID-19 cases and outcomes by race. But even without nationwide data, the numbers are stark. Where race data are known — for only 3,300 of 13,000 COVID-19 deaths — African-Americans account for 42 percent of the deaths, the Associated Press reported April 9. Those data also suggest the disparity could be highest in the South. For instance, in both Louisiana and Mississippi, African-Americans account for over 65 percent of known COVID-19 deaths.
1. African-Americans are more likely to be exposed to COVID-19.
SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, is highly contagious, even before symptoms appear (SN: 3/13/20). So to curb the virus’ spread and limit person-to-person transmission, states have been issuing stay-at-home orders. But many individuals are considered part of the critical workforce by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and must continue to work. That includes caregivers, cashiers, sanitation workers, farm workers and public transit employees, jobs often filled by African-Americans.
For instance, almost 30 percent of employed African-Americans work in the education and health services industry and 10 percent in retail, according to 2019 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. African-Americans are less likely than employed people in general to work in professional and business services — the sorts of jobs more amenable to telecommuting.
2. African-Americans have a higher incidence of underlying health conditions.
Among those at highest risk of getting severely ill with COVID-19 are patients with other serious health problems, such as hypertension, diabetes and heart disease(SN: 3/20/20). Over 40 percent of African-Americans have high blood pressure, among the highest rates in the world, according to the American Heart Association. By comparison, about a third of white Americans have high blood pressure. Similarly, African-Americans tend to have higher rates of diabetes.
Part of that heightened risk has to do with African-Americans’ disproportionate exposure to air pollution. Such pollution has been linked to chronic health problems, including asthma, obesity and cardiovascular disease (SN: 9/19/17). In an April 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sampson and fellow Harvard sociologist Robert Manduca showed that poor African-American neighborhoods have higher levels of lead, air pollution and violence than poor white neighborhoods (SN: 4/12/19).
3. African-Americans have less access to medical care and often distrust caregivers.
Inequities in access to health care, including inadequate health insurance, discrimination fears and distance from clinics and hospitals, make it harder for many African-Americans to access the sort of preventive care that keeps chronic diseases in check.
According to a December 2019 report from The Century Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank based in New York City and Washington, D.C., African-Americans are still more likely to be uninsured than white Americans. And African-Americans who are insured spend a greater fraction of their income on premiums and out-of-pocket costs, about 20 percent, than the average American, who spends about 11 percent.
The COVID-19 global pandemic has taken tens of thousands of lives around the world. Here in the U.S., we at the AMA have repeatedly and consistently demanded urgent action to address the tragic shortages of essentials such as timely diganostic testing, personal protective equipment and ventilators that are impeding our physicians’ efforts to save lives. There is another shortage that desperately requires our nation’s attention: a lack of public data on the racial and ethnic dimensions of this deadly respiratory illness.
So far, less than a dozen states have publicly shared information on the racial and ethnic patterns of COVID-19. Yet what has emerged so far paints an alarming portrait.
Michigan’s newly released data raises particular alarm with a disproportionate percentage, 35% and 40% respectively, of cases and deaths happening among blacks. In Wisconsin’s Milwaukee County, half of the cases and 81% of the deaths were amongst blacks, when blacks only make up only a quarter of the population. In Chicago, seven in 10 COVID-related deaths were among blacks while blacks constitute less than one-third of the city’s population. https://youtu.be/KFCo_VLcFvI
African-Americans can also face hidden biases to care.
For instance, an algorithm used to determine which patients should receive access to certain health care programs inadvertently prioritized white patients over African-American patients(SN: 10/24/19), researchers reported in October 2019 in Science. That disparity arose because the algorithm used health care spending as a proxy for need, but African-Americans often spend less on health care because they are less likely to go to a doctor. In part that may be because African-Americans have a long-standing distrust of the medical establishment due to events such as the Tuskegee experiment (SN: 3/1/75), in which hundreds of African-American men with syphilis were denied treatment for decades.
“These long-standing structural forms of discrimination that African-Americans have faced in the [United States] are manifesting in what we’re seeing with COVID right now,” says epidemiologist Kiarri Kershaw of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
The commitment to fair access to care runs throughout the AMA Code of Medical Ethics. Principle IX enjoins physicians to “support access to care for all people.” Opinion 1.1.2, “Prospective Patients,” instructs physicians to uphold ethical responsibilities not to discriminate on the basis of “personal or social characteristics that are not clinically relevant to the individual’s care,” as does Opinion 8.5, “Disparities in Health Care.” Both Opinion 11.1.1, “Defining Basic Health Care,” and Opinion 11.1.4, “Financial Barriers to Health Care Access,” define health care as “a fundamental human good” that entails obligations to promote access to care on the part of individual physicians, the medical profession, and society at large.
The crisis conditions of a pandemic can acutely challenge this commitment, especially for patient populations already minoritized or marginalized with respect to access to care. The extraordinary burden on staffing created by a pandemic and shortages of critical clinical resources can undermine entry into the system of care itself, and, for patients who do gain entry, access to life-sustaining resources.
Emergency departments can quickly be overwhelmed by seriously ill patients suspected to be infected, along with the insured “worried well” who fear they might be but aren’t ill yet, relegating uninsured patients who are seeking primary care services to the end of the queue. Extended waiting times, especially in crowded waiting rooms, increase their risk of exposure and infection beyond the problem that brought them to the ED. For many of these patients, receiving care in other forms, such as telemedicine, realistically won’t be an option for nonclinical reasons, such as lack of access to Broadband.
Data from US south shows African Americans hit hardest by Covid-19
- Louisiana reports 70% of coronavirus deaths are black
- Alabama says African Americans dying at disproportionate rate
- Coronavirus – live US updates
- Live global updates
- See all our coronavirus coverage
The coronavirus is disproportionately infecting and killing African Americans across much of the south, a region where black Americans are more likely to live in poverty and suffer from chronic disease, a Guardian analysis of several southern states reveals.
Louisiana, a major US hotspot, was the first southern state to categorize Covid-19 deaths by race. On Monday Governor John Bel Edwards announced that a shocking 70% of deaths were among African Americans, despite making up only 33% of the state’s population. The virus has spread to nearly every parish in the state, but the worst of the outbreak has been focused on New Orleans, a majority-black city with one of the country’s highest metro poverty rates.
In Georgia, an incomplete data picture still shows African Americans – who make up 33% of the state’s population, compared with 60% for whites – are being hit disproportionately hard by the virus.
On Wednesday Georgia’s department of public health began releasing the racial breakdown of confirmed coronavirus cases. Twenty per cent of the 9,901 confirmed coronavirus cases are black, compared with 15% who are white. But the vast majority of cases – 64% – are of an “unknown race”.
In Alabama, a similar story is playing out.
Data released on Tuesday by the state’s department of public health showed black Alabamians are being infected and killed by the virus at a disproportionate rate. Black and white patients made up an equal proportion of deaths, at about 44% each. But, of the over 2,000 infections confirmed statewide by 6 April, only 37% were black, while 50% were white.
Alabama’s population is about 27% black and 69% white, according to the latest census data.
South Carolina is reporting 36% of Covid-19 cases are African American, compared with 56% white. Those numbers appear to be based on about 1,000 cases, less than half of the state’s current coronavirus tally of 2,417. The department of health did not respond to requests for updated data or a racial breakdown of coronavirus deaths.
No comments:
Post a Comment