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Spread of the virus has been fairly egalitarian among races. But the death toll is hitting L.A. County’s black residents the hardest.Graphic by CalMatters.
When he worked at a hospital in downtown Los Angeles, Dr. Gregory Taylor saw cases that reflected the community where he grew up: a host of underlying health conditions killing black patients.
Taylor, an internist, called those conditions —diabetes, high blood pressure, respiratory diseases —“a part of the community fabric” among black residents of South Los Angeles.
“It’s true across our ethnicity as a whole,” said Taylor, who grew up in Leimert Park and now works at Keck Hospital of the University of Southern California. “What you see over and over is black folks in a poorer state of health.”
Now those underlying conditions are contributing to African Americans’ vulnerability to COVID-19, which is killing them at the highest rate among all races in Los Angeles County.
Of the 1,418 people who died in Los Angeles County –by far the largest number in California –12.5 percent are black residents, even though they make up 8 percent of the population, according to the Department of Public Health’s dashboard.
A disparate death rate
The spread of the virus in Los Angeles County has been relatively egalitarian: No matter how rich, or white, or educated the neighborhood, nearly every area has confirmed cases of the coronavirus. Some of the highest infection rates are in Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and Melrose, wealthy ZIP codes where more than 75 percent of the population is white.
But the impacts once the coronavirus reaches a neighborhood are a different story.
For instance, in Inglewood, which has one of the largest black populations in Los Angeles County, the death rate from the virus is 34 per 100,000 residents, while in majority-white Glendale, just 14 miles away, it’s 18 deaths per 100,000,according to the county’s dashboard data.
Part of the explanation could be the high rates of underlying health conditions among the area’s black residents. Heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and asthma all lead to more severe outcomes for people with COVID-19.
Residents of the county’s South region, which includes Inglewood, have nearly twice the rate of diabetes as residents of the San Fernando Valley area, which includes Glendale. When asked by UCLA researchers to rate their own health, 25 percent of residents in Inglewood answered fair or poor, the lowest scores in the county, compared with 15% in Glendale.
Although there is still so much medical professionals don’t know about COVID-19, preliminary data throughout the country point to racial disparities in the pandemic.
Recent Southern California numbers show African Americans account for 15 percent of the novel coronavirus-related illnesses and deaths, despite the fact that they only make up 9 percent of Los Angeles County’s population. Dr. Chandra Ford, Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health and Sciences at UCLA and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice and Health, tells Inside the Issues that, initially, data didn’t seem to suggest high rates of illness in African American communities.
“In Los Angeles when we first started getting data, the data suggested that the highest rates of COVID-19 infection were actually occurring in the wealthier communities and that seemed premature to me and my colleagues,” she said. “In part because testing was not widely available to everyone and that seemed to reflect people who had access to testing and people who had traveled abroad.”
Dr. Ford said the messaging in black communities has gone from seeing it as a virus that affects groups differently to stigmatizing why certain groups are contracting the coronavirus. She said lower-income communities aren’t able to easily access hospitals or high-quality health care.
