The New York Times released a blistering report about the effect the COVID-19 pandemic has had on People of Color in the United States. According to data the Times sued the CDC to have access to, Black and Latino people are contracting the virus at 3 times the rate as their White counterparts.
The data also reveals that Blacks and Latinos are twice as likely to die from the virus. Experts claim that the imbalance is in part because minorities are more likely to work in “front line” jobs that expose them to the virus and/or live in a residence where social distancing is not possible.
In one focus group of the New York Times report, Fairfax county in Washington D.C. Latinos are contracting the coronavirus at four times the rate of White people despite whites being 3 times more populous.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention fought to keep this data from public view which forced the newspaper to sue the CDC to get the information. The Times reports that the CDC was missing race ethnicity and county of residence data for “hundreds of thousands of cases.”
It was already known that minority communities were affected in greater numbers than in White communities, but the data laid about by the NYT shows a more complete picture of more than half the U.S. population.
