Watch: COVID-19 Health Equity Gaps
A CSG East-Healthcare Ready micro-summit explores healthcare access issues during pandemic ...
a CSG East | Healthcare Ready feature
Watch the latest #CSGCOVID19 micro-summit below …
The Council of State Governments Eastern Regional Conference, Council on Communities of Color, in partnership with Healthcare Ready, discussed disparity in testing and medical treatment for diverse Black and Brown populations. Racial and income bias have always existed in the medical field, from how underserved populations experience lack of access to healthcare to finding themselves constantly under-diagnosed or how race and income determine their level of care. That bias is showing up in the lack of coronavirus testing in hardest hit Black communities and effecting their odds of survival.
“As policymakers, we have to make sure that we have targeted resources that we look at and ask: where are the gaps in the community?” said Maryland House Delegate Joseline Pena-Melnyk. “We don't need another task force to study this. We know that there's an issue, okay. We don't pay attention to our communities of colors like we should. Often, we are an afterthought. So it's a very complicated issue, but it's one that after this pandemic we need to address because it will happen again. And the disparities are there, the numbers don't lie.”
“What we're seeing just at the very origins when we talked about that gap, there's been reports that European Americans are being moved on to the next level of testing more often than people of color when they call in or are being assessed in regards to that screening,” noted National Medical Association President-elect Leon McDougle. “That's at the very beginning because the resources are scarce, right? So people are trying to conserve nasal swabs and essay to do the viral cultures, so mark that down as one. Now, another step, the doctors say ‘we've determined that you should be screened. So what we'd like you to do is go to our drive up center, on such and such road.’ But, what if you don't have a car? Ah, so what's the next option for that person?”
“What we've kept finding in the last couple of weeks is that the amount of tests that are being conducted in Black and Brown neighborhoods is much lower than is done in wealthier neighborhoods,” said Drexel University’s Usama Bilal. “And we've seen this for Philadelphia. But we've also seen that in those same poor neighborhoods, the likelihood that one of those tests is positive is much higher, indicating that potentially there's a higher burden of disease. Now, it's very hard to be able to confirm that unless there is more widespread testing.”
“Those who are living in extreme poverty, they may fall in for the testing space, but they're not going to even get access to those things that they need,” said epidemiological sociologist Kevin Ahmaad Jenkins. “Again, if this is a war, we were ambushed. I just think that we have to keep framing it, we have to keep coming at it and keep thinking about what are the equity fixes that we all have to do. Thurgood Marshall said it best: ‘the Negro was enslaved by law and was emancipated by law. They're segregated by law, and now has begun to get his equality by law.’ But I'm sitting back saying, ‘Well, if that can happen by law, why should we keep waiting on the law to help us,’ there's going to be some things that we have to do as well as a community to pull together, making sure we keep doing things like this.
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