Public Health Officials, Media Need To Report Coronavirus Deaths By Race
03/31/2020
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Earlier: Black Councilman In Baltimore Says "Implicit Bias" Of White Doctors Greater Threat To Black Community Than Coronavirus

As reported below by Paul Kersey, black councilman Nick Mosby is a black racist who hates white people and blames them for what's wrong in the black community.

However, he's right to ask for public health authorities to report the race of the victims:

When asked about racial details of coronavirus victims the deputy state health secretary said they weren't even asking.

Asked during a Monday news conference whether the state could report cases by race, deputy state health secretary Fran Phillips said, “I’m not aware that we have looked into that.”

A spokesman for Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, Mike Ricci, said Monday he didn’t have an update on Mosby’s request.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not yet made data available by race, either, although high-profile Democratic lawmakers are pushing for more public information.

In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley said comprehensive demographic data on people who are tested or treated for the virus that causes COVID-19 is not available.

“This lack of information will exacerbate existing health disparities and result in the loss of lives in vulnerable communities,” the Massachusetts lawmakers wrote Friday.

Healthy equity advocates say detailed data is an important tool in the fight against the virus. U.S. cities with large black and brown populations, such as Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and New Orleans, have emerged as hot spots of the coronavirus outbreak.

Lawmakers push for racial breakdown in Maryland’s public coronavirus data, seek to spot disparities early, by Talia Richman, Baltimore Sun, March 30, 2020

It's possible that "black and brown" communities will be "hardest hit" by coronavirus because of their own bad public health habits. See Social Distancing Hasn't Caught on Yet in South-Central L.A. and A New York State Legal Professional Says He Doesn't Expect To See DeBlasio's Police Suppressing Public Gatherings Of "Youths".

The real question is how much the disease is affecting and carried by Chinese and Chinese-Americans, who have their own public health challenges, in Chinatowns across the country.

It's also important to know survival rates by race, because doctors need to know this for prognosis and triage.

Lance Welton has been covering this for months:

It would be nice if instead of black politicians asking for this, white politicians would, or doctors of any race. It would also be good if the media would report what the race of people who were dying was, so the public would know. The protocol of "not reporting" race is wildly inappropriate in a pandemic that's shutting down the whole country.

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