As the U.S. death toll approaches 100,000 and confirmed cases of COVID-19 top 1.5 million in the country, there has been no national moment of mourning.
The impact of the coronavirus is even more acutely felt by Black and Latino Americans, who are three times as likely as their white counterparts to personally know someone who has died from infection, a new poll released Friday shows.
The ABC News/Ipsos poll found a 20 percentage point difference between the demographics. In other words, 30% of Black adults and 26% of Latino adults personally know someone who died from complications, compared to 10% of whites. The poll was based on a nationally representative sample of 773 adults 18 or older and conducted in English and Spanish, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 points.
The results track consistently with data collected by local, state, and national authorities, which showed that deaths among Blacks and Latinos have been substantially higher during the coronavirus pandemic. Nationally, nearly a third of patients to contract COVID-19 have been African-American, despite making up only 13% of the population.
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In New York City, which saw one of the worst early outbreaks in the country, Blacks and Latinos are twice as likely to die from infection as whites. And in Louisiana, where Black Americans are a third of the population, they are 70% of the deaths there.
“In many of these communities, the people most impacted, particularly minorities, are public-facing,” Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told COURIER recently. “They’re the ones that are working in skilled nursing homes, they’re bus drivers, they’re in the grocery stores. There are many people in the service industry that are still working today and then you have the challenge, for many of these folks, they’re having to use public transportation, so they’re still out in the public domain going to work.”
The Ipsos poll also looked at levels of confidence surrounding testing. It found that 77% of white Americans are confident that they know of testing locations and 71% believe they would be able to get tested if they deemed it necessary. Nonwhite Americans were somewhat less confident, both about knowing where to go (72%) and their ability to get tested (65%).
RELATED: ‘Those Numbers Take Your Breath Away’: Why Black Americans Are Dying From COVID-19 at Alarming Rates
As the U.S. death toll approaches 100,000 and confirmed cases of COVID-19 top 1.5 million in the country, there has been no national moment of mourning. The CDC offers guidelines for funerals but no national resource is directly addressing the emotional devastation of COVID deaths.
Only 39% of Americans, according to recent polling, approve of the president’s handling of the crisis.
Emiene Wright Emiene Wright is associate editor at Cardinal & PIne. Before that she was on the 24-hour news desk of the Miami Herald and the Detroit Free Press, and her writing has been featured in Crisis, the Charlotte Observer, and Our State magazine.
