We made it a point at News Beat podcast to cover the real-life impact the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic had on the most marginalized among us. Here's a compilation of several episodes chronicling its disparate ramifications on communities of color, those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, and the incarcerated, among others.
In late 2019, a mysterious, pneumonia-like disease began infecting people in Wuhan, China. In a matter of months it swept across the globe, and ultimately, brought all of civilization to its knees.
The World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, and governments and municipalities developed strict mandates in response—with large segments of the population sequestered inside their homes, businesses shuttering, and economies screeching to abrupt, devastating halts.
Although we'll likely never know COVID-19's exact origin—natural zoonotic transmission or a lab leak—to date, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide have been infected and millions have died due to health complications caused by the insidious virus at its core, known as SARS-CoV-2.
Predictably, the crippling virus disproportionately affected low-income and marginalized populations in the United States, including many who were considered “essential” workers—grocery store clerks, food delivery drivers, and transit employees, among others.
The suffering was particularly acute in African American communities, where injustices still permeate and torture—wretched diseases of their own. African Americans have contended housing discrimination, over-policing, and outright racism for generations—stressors that researchers have linked to negative health outcomes and greater susceptibility to COVID-19’s wrath.
When cities began publishing data on those impacted, it revealed African Americans were dying at disproportionately higher rates. In New York City, Black residents were twice as likely to die than whites. A look at city zip codes also illustrated the disparate spread of the virulent disease: Not only were there higher death rates in low-income communities, but wealth was also determining who got tested and who didn’t.
The virus, as we documented in one particularly gut-wrenching episode, exposed profound inequities in American society—inequities, it should be noted, already out in the open yet largely ignored by the political establishment and power elites.
Among those most vulnerable to the spread of the disease were America’s 2.2 million inmates.
On March 13, in an interview on this very podcast, the physician, epidemiologist, and former Chief Medical Officer of the NYC Correctional Health Services Dr. Homer Venters warned of a “perilous and looming threat” inside America’s correctional institutions. Alas, his words were tragically prescient.
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While the coronavirus indiscriminately ravaged communities across the nation, African Americans died at disproportionately higher rates. Those who studied racial health disparities weren't surprised, considering that African Americans suffer inordinately from chronic conditions—symptoms linked to systemic racism, and a deleterious physiological process dubbed "weathering" three decades ago.
As the coronavirus pandemic exposed long-standing inequities in the United States, marginalized communities suffered the worst from the consequences of a broken economy, neglect, and a decaying social safety net.
For weeks, Florida resisted bans on nonessential workers, as many other states across the country urged residents to stay home. We interviewed a staff attorney with the ACLU of Florida about efforts there to protect the state's incarcerated population. In the second half of the episode, we spoke with an expert on the impact incarceration has on families about widespread visitation bans amid the pandemic.
On March 13, the foremost expert on healthcare in correctional settings appeared on this podcast and warned of a "perilous and looming threat" inside these facilities. Rikers Island soon had more than 200 coronavirus cases and recorded its first COVID-19-related death. Advocates warned that anyone held in the jail was in mortal danger.
One of the foremost experts on correctional health services warned of a “very perilous and looming threat” inside American correctional facilities amid the coronavirus pandemic outbreak.
The top COVID-19 clusters across America were overwhelmingly jails and prisons, and efforts to reduce jail populations stalled amid a surge in infections. Among the hardest hit was San Quentin State Prison in California, responsible for about a quarter of the state prison system’s COVID-19 infections and almost half its deaths. Read more.
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