If the United States had paid compensation to descendants of black Americans who were enslaved, the risk of serious illness and death from the virus would have been much lower, according to a new study peer-reviewed by researchers.
The group of researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice, examined how compensation payments made before the pandemic would have affected Louisiana, a state that remains segregated into parts, and found that payments could have reduced transmission. of coronavirus in the state somewhere between 31% to 68%.
The researchers’ latest findings highlight the importance of a pandemic strategy that considers the racial difference in Covid-19 exposure and transmission, the researchers said.
“Our study simply gives one more example of how racism enters people’s bodies and makes them sick, which can be added to this litany (from evidence for damages).”
The study created a repair model
To model how repairs would have affected Covid-19 transmission, the researchers chose Louisiana, one of the states that reported cases of Covid-19 by race at the start of the pandemic and a state where the population is still “highly segregated” between blacks and non-black residents, according to the study.
The researchers compared Louisiana at the start of the pandemic with South Korea, a relatively egalitarian society that does not have a “large, segregated subgroup of the population made up of descendants of enslaved people”. Their goal, according to the study, was to see if the difference in infection rates was caused by differences in social structures.
To do this, the researchers created a statistical model using “R-nada”, a mathematical term that represents the average number of people to whom an infected person transmits the virus. The term also represents social structure, behavior and differential risk, Richardson told CNN.
They did their calculations with a model that would pay $ 250,000 in damages per person or $ 800,000 per family. They also compared Louisiana and South Korea using infection data rates for the first two months of the epidemic.
The researcher’s model found that it took Louisiana twice as long as South Korea to bring the R-nothing value below 1, “the critical value at which an outbreak dies in a population”.
If repairs had been introduced well before the pandemic and narrowed the equity gap between blacks and whites, coronavirus transmission in Louisiana could have been reduced by between 31% and 68% for residents of all races, the study concluded.
Structural racism caused disparities in Covid-19, say researchers
Previous explanations for black Americans’ high risk of serious illness or death due to Covid-19 pointed to high rates of pre-existing illnesses like cancer and diabetes or “personal failure” to follow public health advice, the researchers wrote.
But these explanations do not address how systemic racism positions black Americans in a way that makes them more likely to be exposed to Covid-19 and less likely to survive it.
Institutionalized racism in the United States has put black Americans at a disadvantage for centuries, beginning with slavery, then the segregation and dangerous policies of the Jim Crow era and now the inequalities that continue today, like fatal police encounters, high rates of incarceration and prejudice found in health care, employment, housing and more.
“These risks are structural – that is, not determined by personal choice or rational assessment,” said Richardson in an email to CNN.
The “mismanagement” of the Covid-19 response in the United States “exacerbated these disparities,” wrote the researchers.
Black workers are overrepresented on the front lines in sectors such as food, health and day care, all jobs that require direct contact with customers, which increases the risk of exposure to Covid-19.
If reparations had been enacted before the pandemic, the researchers wrote, this could have reduced the division of racial wealth, alleviating overcrowding so that black Americans were better able to distance themselves socially and spread “frontline work” among racial groups.
Covid’s strategy should include repairs, says study
Recognizing these structural causes in responding to the U.S. pandemic is essential to alleviate some of the disproportionate burden that Covid-19 has on black Americans, said Richardson.
The reparations, Harvard researchers argue, would be a valuable addition to existing strategies and their effects would extend far beyond the end of the pandemic.
CNN’s Nicole Chavez and Jacqueline Howard contributed to this report.