There Is No Mystery...

I rode my bike over to a friend's house a couple of weeks ago. We got to talking about the coronavirus (what else?), and the people we knew who had been infected.

I told them about my sister: she had a stroke a decade ago, resulting in aphasia and paralysis on the right side of her body. She lives in a group home with four residents. The place had been in lockdown since early March, but one of the workers brought the virus in and my sister got sick. She was in the hospital for a weekend, but didn't need a ventilator, and she's recuperating now.

One of the guests was skeptical about the disaster that was unfolding in New York, especially in minority communities, certain that something else was going on there, insinuating some dark conspiracy or what, I don't know.

There's no mystery. The virus was brought into the city by business travelers coming from China, and vacationers returning from Europe. It didn't start in minority communities.

On the plane travelers infected flight crews and fellow passengers. At the airport they infected gate agents, janitors, rest room attendants, porters and other travelers. On the way home or to the hotel they infected Uber and cab drivers. At hotels these travelers infected check-in clerks, concierges, and maids. Residents of the city infected their doormen, maids, cooks, nannies. And their wives, husbands and kids.

Once in the city they went to stores, bodegas, bakeries, bars and restaurants, where they infected shopkeepers, stock clerks, bakers, bartenders, busboys, waiters and maitre d's.

Notice how most of the people travelers come into contact are working low-paying service jobs, which are very frequently staffed by minorities.

The population density in New York is the highest in the country, over 70,000 people per square mile in Manhattan. People, especially poorly-paid minorities, don't have cars, they ride the subways, crammed into standing-room-only trains.

So, if there's one place in the United States where you'd expect a disease to run rampant, it's New York.

An Ohio state senator was fired from his job as a physician this week for saying that "colored people" don't wash their hands as well as other groups:

State Senator Stephen A. Huffman, a Republican and a doctor, made his remarks on Tuesday during a hearing of the Senate Health Committee about whether to declare racism a public health crisis. They came as he speculated about reasons black people might be more “susceptible” to Covid-19.

“Could it just be that African-Americans or the colored population do not wash their hands as well as other groups or wear a mask or do not socially distance themselves?” he said. “Could that be the explanation of why the higher incidence?”

It's incredible that this guy would make this statement after literally months of news reports about Walmart and Amazon not giving their workers personal protective equipment such as masks, gloves, hand sanitizer and disinfectant. Most of these jobs don't offer health care or sick leave. Many employers demanded that workers show up even if they were sick.

The people who work at group homes like the one where my sister lives, and the nursing homes where the coronavirus has killed tens of thousands of elderly residents, are usually women, often minorities, almost always poorly paid, and very frequently working two or three different part time jobs at different facilities.

The very nature of their jobs prevents any kind of social distancing: they have lift elderly residents out of bed and put them in wheelchairs, put "transfer belts" on them to hoist them up, sit them on the toilet, give them baths, comb their hair, and even feed them.

Another major vector for the disease in the Midwest has been meat-packing plants, where the lines have workers standing shoulder to shoulder hacking chickens, cows and pigs apart. These jobs are difficult and horrible, poorly paid, and mostly staffed by immigrants and minorities. And then Trump issued an executive order to force workers to show up at these "critical infrastructure" jobs. I guess he can't survive without his Big Macs.

And as for masks: doesn't Huffman remember anything? At the start of the pandemic Trump told us the virus would disappear "like magic." Then the Trump administration told us all that masks wouldn't help. Then they said that masks should go to medical professionals instead. And then those same medical professionals couldn't get hold of masks! And then there was the price gouging by companies selling masks on Amazon. And the story about the faulty masks being passed off by a Trump crony to the Indian Health Service.

How can this guy possibly criticize the "colored population" for not wearing masks, when Donald Trump absolutely refuses to wear one, and many of Huffman's fellow Republicans in Congress and dozens of state legislatures categorically refuse to wear them?

Not wearing a mask, going out to bars and restaurants and ignoring social distancing rules have become a rallying cry for rabid Republicans, and yet somehow the "colored population" is at fault for getting sick because they work jobs that force them into close contact with people, their employers make them work when sick, and there were no masks to be had by anybody?

And once they get sick, American minorities are disproportionately affected by the coronavirus because they have a greater incidence of medical conditions such as obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes, which increase the likelihood of dying, because they're poorer, live in "food deserts" and eat poorly, and have less access to health care.

There's no underlying secret conspiracy or racial predisposition behind New York's infection rate or the deadly toll the pandemic has had on minority groups. If you just open your eyes to the realities of life for the working poor, it's obvious that these people are sicker because American society has chosen to pay people working essential jobs next to nothing under terrible conditions.