The fire this time: The stress of racism, inflammation and COVID-19

Abstract

It is said that crisis reveals character. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the inequitable character of the U.S. health care system by the alarming death rates among African Americans with COVID-19. Nationwide, African Americans represent a third of hospitalized COVID-19 patients but make up only 13% of the U.S. population. In Chicago, one of the nation’s hotspots, African American make up 42% of the cases and 56% of the deaths from the virus (Chicago COVID-19, 2020). These racial disparities have been noted in other countries as well. A recent study from the United Kingdom demonstrated that Black participants had a 4-fold increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations compared to their White participants, even after controlling for several economic and physiological factors (Lassale et al., 2020).