New York (CNN Business) America
America has an inequality problem and the coronavirus crisis is making it worse.
The pandemic is leaving few people untouched, but America’s weakest demographic groups are shouldering the worst burden through job losses and front-line work, against a backdrop of a higher risk of infections and lower savings.
The average black and Hispanic families are already bringing in less income that the average white family, but they also have a smaller buffer of liquid assets like savings and investments, according to a new report from the JPMorgan Chase Institute.
This leaves these demographics most vulnerable to the aftershocks of the coronavirus crisis.
Black and Hispanic workers are also more likely than white workers to be in jobs that pay by the hour. That makes them more susceptible to layoffs. Twenty-two million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits over the past month.
“As families face job loss and income uncertainty resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, this report shows that black and Hispanic families will bear the brunt of this economic crisis,” said Diana Farrell, President and CEO of the JPMorgan Chase Institute.
This also means that government programs to help the country through the outbreak — including the expanded unemployment insurance and stimulus payments — are particularly important for the black and Hispanic communities.
Outside the coronavirus crisis, the report’s finding underscores the persistent racial gap in America’s economy. And this inequality is making minorities more susceptible to economic hardship during hard times, including the current outbreak.
“Policymakers should consider these findings to address the needs of communities disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 and the racial wealth gap more broadly,” said Darrick Hamilton, executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University.
Black and Hispanic families earn between 71 cents and 74 cents for each dollar earned by the median white family, according to the JPMorgan report. But the racial gap in liquid assets between is far larger, and that means these minority families have a much thinner cushion to fall back on to weather the storm of economic shocks.
For every $1 of liquid assets of a white family, the median Black family has only 32 cents, while the median Hispanic family has 47 cents.
Financial Inequality Highlighted by Pandemic
BP Adams Convenes Bereavement Task Force
Addresses City’s Overwhelmed “Death Care System”
On Monday, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams convened funeral home directors, faith leaders, morgue operators, cemeteries, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), and other stakeholders for a Bereavement Task Force call on the Zoom platform as the city continues to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
To date, it is estimated that more than 18,000 people in New York City have died due to COVID-19. In recent weeks, funeral homes have reported being overwhelmed by the number of decedents, which was vividly illustrated last week when dozens of bodies were discovered in a U-Haul truck outside a funeral home in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn. Borough President Adams and members of the task force discussed potential policy solutions that ensure decedents are being treated in a dignified manner, and which allow their loved ones to lay their bodies to rest peacefully.
Last week, Borough President Adams stood outside the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to demand reforms in the way bodies are handled and laid to rest. Among the changes he called for were extending the hours morgues were open across the city to allow funeral homes to retrieve the bodies, and mandating that non-private cemeteries across the state double the capacity of burials.
“Even a public health crisis of this magnitude should not get in the way of treating decedents with basic dignity, said Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. “These aren’t just pieces of flesh; these are our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, loved ones. We must institute common-sense reforms to make our handling of bodies more respectful and allow families to have the comfort of a proper, quick ceremony [since not everyone buries their dead]. That’s why we are convening this task force today — to come up with a comprehensive set of proposals to ensure that the unimaginable pain of losing a loved one is not compounded by seeing their body treated in a disrespectful manner.”
New York City Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Barbara Sampson committed the cooperation of her office.
“We remain dedicated to supporting the funerary industry and the families they serve in these complex times, through streamlining our processes and offering expanded pickup times to funeral directors working with us,” said Sampson. “We will work closely with stakeholders, as well as the Office of Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams to help ensure continuity in service and support standards throughout the death-management system. Treating the dead with dignity and respect remains the guiding principle of our work.”
“We thank Borough President Adams for the opportunity to participate on the committee,” said New York State Funeral Directors Association Executive Director Michael Lanotte. “Our approach with our members from the beginning of the pandemic has been that we cannot over-communicate throughout the crisis, and the committee’s discussion is consistent with that approach. Efforts like this help all stakeholders in deathcare have the tools and resources needed to ensure we are helping families through the difficult days following the loss of a loved one,”
“At no time in recent history has New York City’s deathcare industry faced a crisis of this proportion,” said Green-Wood Cemetery President Richard J. Moylan. “Morgues, funeral homes, and cemeteries are nearing the breaking point. Green-Wood applauds Borough President Adams for his leadership in seeking commonsense and realistic solutions to this problem. Working together we will ensure that every family affected by a COVID-19 death is treated with the utmost respect and dignity in their time of grief,”
During the call, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner highlighted three recent policy changes to help the “deathcare” system function more smoothly.
A location to store bodies is being set up at Pier 39 to ease the burden on funeral homes and extend the window during which bodies can be retrieved before they are buried temporarily or permanently at Hart Island.
Personal protective equipment (PPE) will be distributed to cemetery workers and funeral home workers.
The Office of the Medical Examiner will be extending its operating hours to 10:30 PM every day.
Bernice Green of Our Time Press asked, “Borough President Adams, it’s a matter of life or death with Cuomo as the leader. And you are saying we need to honor everything about these deaths? Do you know of anyone who has the coronavirus or who has passed away, and what are your personal feelings about it?
Adams: Well I’ve had five personal friends who passed away, and it really personifies the depth of COVID. One of them was a rookie police officer that I trained. Another was my mentor who taught me to go into politics, that I’ve known for over 40 years—Dr Roy Hastick.
So this is not only a professional pursuit, it’s a personal pursuit. And I believe that COVID-19… revealed how we must rethink about how we govern in cities and across America. And there’s going to be a great opportunity for reflection. But even in the period of reflection, there are things we can do now that can save lives.
We should have never sent our essential employees into harm’s way. And we knew it was harm’s way—such as an inability to socially distance or to shelter in place, an inability to do their jobs.
And we appear to be making some adjustments [but] we should not have had a stockpile of masks in the MTA and not get those masks to employees until eighty of our men and women die.
And so, when we look at this again, I think that the country made some moves that we need to really have a close examination of. And some of the examination is going to come after COVID 19, but some should take place now so we could readjust what we’re doing.
This is not a professional pursuit to make sure we are equitable in addressing this, it’s a personal pursuit. It’s traumatic to know and to lose five people that I had a longstanding relationship. COVID 19 is here for a period of time. But we’re losing people we knew for a lifetime. Thank you.
Coronavirus is Killing More African Americans than any Other Group in the US, Study Finds
By Shelby Lin Erdman
(CNN) There’s new evidence more African Americans may be dying from coronavirus in the United States than whites or other ethnic groups, according to a new study.
Black Americans represent 13.4% of the American population, according to the US Census Bureau, but counties with higher Black populations account for more than half of all COVID-19 cases and almost 60% of deaths, the study found.
Coronavirus in Black America: Living in the eye of a ‘perfect storm’
Disparities, including access to health care, are likely to blame, researchers concluded in a report released Tuesday.
The team of epidemiologists and clinicians at four universities worked with amfAR, the AIDS research non-profit, and Seattle’s Center for Vaccine Innovation and Access, PATH, to analyze COVID-19 cases and deaths using county-level comparisons. Racial data is still lacking in many areas, and their analysis uses what data was available as of mid-April.
How coronavirus is deepening American inequality
They compared counties with a disproportionate number of Black residents – those with a population of 13% or more – with those with lower numbers of African American residents. Counties with higher populations of Black residents accounted for 52% of coronavirus diagnoses and 58% of COVID-19 deaths nationally, they said.
“Social conditions, structural racism, and other factors elevate risk for COVID-19 diagnoses and deaths in Black communities,” wrote the scientists from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, the University of Mississippi Medical Center and Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law.
America’s Black and Hispanic communities are bearing the brunt of the coronavirus
“Structural factors including health care access, density of households, unemployment, pervasive discrimination and others drive these disparities, not intrinsic characteristics of Black communities or individual-level factors.”
Of the more than 3,100 counties researchers looked at with coronavirus cases and deaths from late January to mid-April, they found a greater percentage of disproportionately Black counties were in the South. The African American populations ranged from 13% of the county total to over 87%.
“COVID-19 deaths were higher in disproportionally Black rural and small metro counties,” the study noted.
The research showed that by April 13, there were 283,750 COVID-19 diagnoses in disproportionately Black counties and 12,748 deaths compared with 263,640 coronavirus cases and 8,886 deaths in all other counties.
“Collectively, these data demonstrate significantly higher rates of COVID-19 diagnoses and deaths in disproportionately Black counties compared to other counties, as well as greater diabetes diagnoses, heart disease deaths, and cerebrovascular disease deaths in unadjusted analyses,” the authors concluded.
The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, is currently under consideration by a medical journal and has not yet been published.
City, Nation and World Hunger for Born Leaders:
During this COVID-19 pandemic, as politicians scramble and scientists shake their heads, the public is waiting, hungry for food and more. In the top photo, Protein food stores are becoming increasingly scarce; the national food supply chain is collapsing; lines are getting longer for food distribution. But they are also hungry for strong leadership and rational guidance. This week, aggressive leadership focused on giving dignity, and some power to the people, emerged. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams convened funeral home directors, faith leaders, morgue operators, cemeteries, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), and other stakeholders for a Bereavement Task Force. Georgia Congresswoman and former police chief Val Demings is Our Time Press’ choice to join Presidential hopeful Biden as his Vice Presidential running mate, and Governor Cuomo, is looking to the city, the nation and the world like he’s the natural successor to Obama. (Credits: Food line: © Julia Mineeva/TheNEWS2 via ZUMA Wire) Cuomo Credit Image: © Albin Lohr-Jones/Pacific Press via ZUMA Wire)
Leadership in Dangerous Times
View From Here
By David Mark Greaves
Inspiration. That is the feeling I was surprised by. Governor Andrew Cuomo was giving his daily briefing about what’s involved with disinfecting the entire NYC transit system every day. And in his laying out the challenge he had given the MTA, and their ability to do it was inspiring. Only in President Barack Obama had I had that feeling before. But for Obama, it was for another reason, he is what we would have been if not hobbled by the imprint of four hundred years of slavery.
Cuomo’s inspiration came from another source. It was a sense of “Thank you!” At last someone who knows how to solve problems with the power to do it! He uses the machinery of government to make things happen in the real world and he tells us how that’s going.
He’s creative, and using how the crisis highlights patterns, seeing states competing against one another, he brought together a medical supply-buying consortium consisting of New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Maryland. So now they’ve got billions of dollars in buying power, (the governor of Maryland, population 6 million, was very happy to be running with this bunch) and they’re ready to buy from manufacturers in China. China? He says that depending on China for equipment to protect Americans is a national security issue. So, they’ll work with the best they have right now, but look to see “Made in USA” going forward.
It started with Bernice and I watching his daily briefings and repeatedly saying he should be president. And then speaking with my son in Arizona, he brought up the Cuomo briefings and began referring to Governor Cuomo as President Cuomo. A cousin and her daughter in Atlanta, entirely unprompted by me, both spoke of the briefings and Governor Cuomo as president. Brother-in-law Bryan in Brooklyn, while heaping praise on Cuomo, said he’d vote for President Cuomo and Vice President Fauci. His girlfriend Dee corrected us on leadership, saying, “He’s running New York and leading the country.”
In the highly unlikely event of Joe Biden faltering in any way, the Democratic Televention could easily draft Governor Cuomo in August, when the latest projections based on prematurely re-opening, even with social distancing being practiced, will result in over 134,000 deaths. And that’s only in mid-summer. (All the deaths by combat in World War 1, 53,402, Vietnam, 58,209, and Korea, 33,686, come to 145,297.) One of the reasons this number does not stop the reopening, may be this from MSN.com:
“Although communities across the US have been devastated, a new study suggests more African Americans are dying from the virus in the US than whites or other ethic groups.
“Black Americans represent 13.4% of the US population, according to the US Census Bureau, but counties with higher Black populations account for more than half of all coronavirus cases and almost 60% of deaths,” the study found.
When Trump acknowledged there will be more deaths, but says of Americans, “they’re warriors,” he’s speaking to his white nationalist base, and the war they’re in is the racial one. That is why they rally at Michigan’s state capital with guns and confederate flags and why Trump shows his support. This is an extraordinarily dangerous time for African Americans and Latinos in America. The virus has exposed the many levels of the systemic hostility to our presence, descendants of those who owned the land and those who built it up. Disengaging from our side of the battle is not an option.
How do we fight back?
Get healthy. At the end of the summer, when we could be at 200,000 deaths with flu season coming, your “future self” will thank you for building your immune system today.
Get Counted. Fill out the Census by mail or online. It will determine how much money our area will get for the next ten years.
Get Organized and Vote. Be your own leader, willing your self to watch for and support leadership wherever it’s found.
Barack Obama was a community organizer with skills. You may recognize that quality in someone on a tenant committee and in organizing groups to successfully achieve a goal. Vote in the elections and vote with your credit card. Give money locally and on the national level, they will take a dollar and up.
People recognize and appreciate leadership in a crisis, not the press release or the photo op. And it’s not just Cuomo showing why, as he said, “We get the big bucks.” Mayor de Blasio, other governors and mayors across the country are displaying the leadership people look to in a crisis. And given the race war we are in, they have drawn the virulent ire of the white supremacists because by putting lives over money, they are playing roles akin to the Abolitionists before the Civil War. Taking actions that will save Black and brown lives.
And finally, take a good, hard look at Florida Congresswoman Val Demings as a vice presidential candidate. She’s a former chief of police and we were first introduced to her at the impeachment hearing and her subsequent presentation on the Senate floor. Like Obama, the woman has skills, and like Obama, she’d inject the possibility of change in America, but now at a time when so many see it’s needed.