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Coronavirus Disease 2019
Will America Tolerate Increasing COVID-19 Deaths?
We will so long as they don’t affect us personally.
Posted June 20, 2020 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
As I write this, the U.S. has had 119,000 COVID-19 deaths. The latest modeling projects 200,000 or more American deaths by the end of September.
Yet virtually all parts of the country continue to de-escalate quarantine and prophylactic (e.g., wearing masks) efforts as the country “re-opens” economically and socially. The question is, will Americans willingly tolerate this level of mortality among its citizens?
Who is dying?
One answer to this question is to ask another—who is dying?
The victims of COVID-19 deaths are overwhelmingly older:
(deaths per 100,000)
Over 85=481
75-84=160
65-74=63
55-64=27
45-54=11
So (omitting the oldest group), those 75-84 are dying at 15 times the rate of those 45-54.
Selecting the lower-death-rate age group, those 45-54, black and Hispanic-Latino age groups are dying at at least six times the rate of whites.
We don’t have the exact numbers of the death rates for meat-processing plant workers, but geographical data indicate that meat plants are one of the sources of hot spots for infections around the country.
Turning to the individual city with the highest COVID death rate in the country, and among the highest in the world, New York, there are remarkable disparities among zip codes by income, and thus race. In some zip codes in Manhattan, there have been virtually no deaths. The highest death rate, in East New York (a poor, minority populated section of Brooklyn), is 636 deaths per 100,000.*
It is accurate to say that white people in the wealthiest parts of the country face almost no chance of dying due to COVID-19. The ratio between the richest and poorest, corresponding to highest and lowest minority representation, is almost incalculable.
Yet looking at racial minorities and immigrants (who overwhelmingly form the workforce in meatpacking plants) doesn’t identify the social group most vulnerable to COVID-19 infection and death.
That would be the prison population, which forms the most intense hot spots for COVID-19, and these are worsening:
(June 16): Cases of the coronavirus in prisons and jails across the United States have soared in recent weeks, even as the overall daily infection rate in the nation has remained relatively flat.
The number of prison inmates known to be infected has doubled during the past month to more than 68,000. Prison deaths tied to the coronavirus have also risen, by 73 percent since mid-May. By now, the five largest known clusters of the virus in the United States are not at nursing homes or meatpacking plants, but inside correction institutions [my emphasis], according to data The New York Times has been collecting about confirmed coronavirus cases since the pandemic reached American shores.
And the risk of more cases appears imminent [my emphasis]. The swift growth in virus cases behind bars comes as demonstrators arrested as part of large police brutality protests across the nation have often been placed in crowded holding cells in local jails.
Like zip code data, prison data represent astronomical racial and income ratios, with poor people and minorities overwhelmingly represented in prison populations.
Finally, one last predictor variable to throw in the mix — chronic health conditions.
People with underlying medical conditions such as heart disease and diabetes were hospitalized six times as often as otherwise healthy individuals infected with the novel coronavirus during the first four months of the pandemic, and they died 12 times as often [my emphasis].
Who cares?
And so, although infection rates are increasing in many parts of the country, along with death rates, both infections and deaths are highly concentrated among the elderly, the poor, minorities, immigrants doing undesirable jobs, prison inmates, and chronically ill people.
Thus it seems that Americans at large are willing to tolerate such deaths to reopen the country to work, political (including both political protests and Trump rallies), and recreational (swimming, dining) opportunities, because, in many cases, they are personally unaffected.
And they are largely right in expecting that they will be unaffected by these deaths. A white person under 55 without diabetes or heart disease has almost no chance of dying from COVID-19. What would make such a person stay home or wear a mask?
The only thing that would reverse the growing acceptance of the emergence from the cocoon of self- and government-imposed quarantines would be a feeling for the larger community.
What are the chances of that happening?
According to a new poll from the American Enterprise Institute conducted from May 21 to June 5, 41 percent of Americans say the government should allow businesses to open back up even if it means putting some people at risk, up from 22 percent in late March.
Meanwhile:
The AEI poll found that 82 percent of black Americans said it’s better for the government to take all necessary steps to ensure the public is safe, even if means keeping businesses closed for longer and hurting the economy, while only 16 percent said that businesses should be allowed to open back up if some are put at risk.
In this—as in so much else—America is a nation at war with itself.
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* I live in a zip code in Brooklyn with one of the highest rates of infection and death, Flatbush. People in my neighborhood observe strict social distancing and virtually all wear masks, including me (I am 74).
