This is hard to hear, and I fear it is only the beginning of the bad news we're going to hear about #COVID19 and health disparities. I've been asked 3 times in the past 24 hours about what we could do differently right now. A short thread: 1/6
I've given the same depressing answer every time - I'm not in a position to judge the specific efforts of local public health departments. We can't read this as a real time failure to intervene and test - that is the wrong lesson here. Testing is a national embarrassment. 2/6
Racial disparities are a national shame. They are the culmination of a process that goes back to 1619 and before. We've spend centuries building up to a moment where a largely unchecked pandemic tears through marginalized communities, including African American neighborhoods. 3/6
We've allowed racism, white nationalism, austerity, and poverty to just ravage black communities in the U.S. We've allowed health disparities to fester, and turned a blind eye to our social safety-net and public health systems. We've left our neighbors uniquely vulnerable. 4/6
What we're witnessing is the result of these decisions. I've been criticized off-line for sharing zip-code maps and scatterplots highlighting race/class. The data aren't perfect. Zip-codes are problematic. Fuck. That. Noise. The data we have are a raging, glaring alarm bell. 5/6
They're a flawed alarm bell, but an alarm just the same. I'm gutted by the news that each fatality so far is an African American person. I'm grieving for my neighbors. And I'm resolved to not go back to normal when this is over. Normal got us to this point. Fuck normal. 6/6
