Data shows COVID-19’s impact on the African-American community

JACKSON, Tenn. — “That’s what the NAACP has been fighting for over a 110 years,” Jackson-Madison County NAACP president, Harrell Carter said.

Over 20,000 people have died from coronavirus, and there’s new numbers surfacing everyday.

In many states there’s an ongoing trend: Data shows African-Americans are being impacted more than other races.

As of Monday, there are 76 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Madison County. 56 percent of those cases are African-Americans.

West Tennessee Healthcare chief physician executive, Dr. Jackie Taylor says this is believed to be due to underlying health conditions within the African-American community.

“We know in the African-American community that diabetes is twice as high as in white people, and hypertension is 40 percent higher,” Taylor said.

The health conditions have put more people of color at risk to contract coronavirus and have serious health complications from it.

“People of color are more likely to live in densely packed areas and in multi-generational housing situations, which creates higher risk for spread of a highly contagious disease like COVID-19,” U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Jerome Adams said.

Carter says these results are not surprising.

“With a pandemic like this, we understood that it would hit those of the least first,” Carter said.

‘The lack of access to quality healthcare has already been an issue,” Carter said.

“The chronic burden of medical bills is likely to make people of color especially less resilient to the ravages of COVID-19,” Adams said.

“There’s also higher rates of obesity and asthma, so that would put them at higher risk,” Dr. Jackie Adams said.

According to health departments in other states like Mississippi, 67 percent of African-Americans have died from the virus, 57 percent in Alabama and 46 percent in South Carolina.

“Social distancing and teleworking we know are critical and you’ve heard Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci talk about how they prevent the spread of coronavirus. Yet only one in five African-Americans and one in six Hispanics has a job that lets them work from home,” Adams said.

“And this pandemic, as unfortunate as it is, have pointed out our weaknesses, but it also points us in a road map that we can do better than what were doing,” Carter said.

With these underlying health conditions faced by some African-Americans, Taylor urges people of color to take the coronavirus guidelines seriously.

The Jackson-Madison County Health Department confirmed 76 total cases in the county at 4 p.m. The health department will have another update tomorrow at 10 a.m.