Of the 110,000 Americans who have died from complications of COVID-19, nearly a quarter of them were black: churchgoers, mourners, singers, school principals, police chiefs, public-transit operators, doctors and nurses, young and old.
I am a scientist who, for the past nine weeks, has been studying the respiratory virus that is disproportionately killing people who look like me. “I can’t breathe”—the way George Floyd pleaded for mercy as a white police officer in Minneapolis killed him late last month—has become a slogan for those protesting against police violence and systemic racism in America. But it also captures the deep inequities that have allowed the coronavirus to claim so many black lives, and neither the scientific community nor the public-health world is confronting the problem directly.
Black Americans are strikingly vulnerable to COVID-19. Since data collection began, black Americans have consistently died of COVID-19 at roughly twice the rate of any other group. At the same time, black Americans are villainized and brutalized for supposed offenses such as wearing a mask and not wearing a mask. While police gently hand masks to white people, black people are seldom given any benefit of the doubt.
I fully understand how viruses work. They exploit vulnerabilities, invading and quietly using their hosts’ cells to replicate, and then spread to other vulnerable hosts. As a black woman, I am doubly vulnerable—to COVID-19, and to the systemic racism that has always plagued my community. And at the ..
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