Thread by @NonHumanMedia1

Structural Racism and COVID-19 in the USA: a County-Level Empirical Analysis 🧵1/9
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

"In the USA, substantial and persistent disparities in health outcomes and healthcare access across race and ethnicity are well documented, particularly among non-Hispanic Black residents."

"We find significant associations between higher levels of measured structural racism and

...higher rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths, even after adjusting for county-level population sociodemographic characteristics, measures of population health, access to healthcare, population density, and duration of the COVID-19 outbreak."

"We believe there is an urgent need to attend to Black Americans’ experiences in order to stop this continual perpetuation of violence on Black bodies."

"Racial segregation overlaps with concentrated poverty and a lack of job opportunities."

"Those living in segregated areas tend to have access to fewer healthcare resource and poorer environmental quality, as well as lower quality, more crowded housing conditions."

"We find that higher ratios of Black:White population percentage in poverty are associated with higher case rates, but not death rates."

"Even after controlling for the different structural racism indicators, the percentage of Black residents in a county is still significantly positively associated with COVID-19 cases per 1000 residents in a county."

"We find that counties with higher levels of structural racism were more severely impacted by the virus, which supports our argument that researchers should not rely on the usual basket of individual behavioral or biological risk factors to explain health disparities."

"Our study thus reinforces the call for more individual-level race/ethnicity data on testing, cases, and deaths, and for more multilevel studies on how individuals’ outcomes interact with structural parameters such as the ones we explore."