WUNC
By Stacia Brown and Frank Stasio
April 22, 2020
In North Carolina and across the nation, black communities are contracting and dying from COVID-19 at disproportionately high rates. But there has been little consensus about why that may be the case.
Some health officials cite “pre-existing medical conditions” as a key factor. Black Americans are more likely to suffer from hypertension, heart disease, asthma and diabetes than white Americans — all conditions that could make them more susceptible to contracting COVID-19 and less likely to recover from it.
Other public health experts believe that structural inequity is the larger contributor. Workers in black communities are less able to work from home and more likely to use public transportation, two factors which add an increased risk of exposure to coronavirus.
To unpack other structural and systemic inequities that factor into racial health disparities, host Frank Stasio talks to public health scholar Lori Carter-Edwards, an associate professor at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, and William “Sandy” Darity, director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University and co-author of the new book, “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century” (UNC Press/2020).
Read the whole story here.
