What Accounts for Coronavirus Disparities?

A helpful Q&A

A Q&A between The Vermont Conversation host David Goodman and Harvard social epidemiologist Nancy Krieger on how racism kills.

Goodman: The mantra of the Covid-19 moment is “we are all in this together.” But Covid-19 has, in fact, highlighted deep fault lines in our society that show how unequally and differently we’re affected. For example, in Illinois, 14% of the population is African American, but they represent more than 40% of the state’s confirmed coronavirus cases. What accounts for these disparities?

Nancy Krieger: I want to address both parts of what you’re saying. Because I do think that there is a fundamental point of our common humanity, which is really critical to understand here — because there is so much scientific racism and attempts to racialize different populations, and act as if they’re biologically different. Everyone who is a human is potentially at risk of being infected by this coronavirus, which seems to have done a very nice job of figuring out how to get itself around in human populations, particularly in terms of its skill at asymptomatic transmission. It kills a lot of people, but many people that get sick don’t die. It’s not like, for example, if you got cholera and people would be literally dying in the street within 24 hours of being infected.

We as human beings are commonly at risk of this kind of infection if you think of us as biological organisms. But we’re also never just biological organisms. We are…