COVID-19’s Disproportionate Impact on the “Latinx” Community
RACISM AS A PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS
By Joseph Graterol, MD
22
Two experiences have exemplified my work as an emergency physician lately. The first is having a 60-year-old male come into the emergency department (ED) gasping for air after being recently diagnosed with COVID-19. He had saturations of 60 percent and despite my best noninvasive ventilation efforts, he seemed at ease after I told him that he would need to be intubated. The second was a 30-year-old male, also COVID-19 positive, who was stable without an oxygen requirement. He related to me how he felt fortunate that he had SARS-CoV-2 and not coronavirus and was surprised when I explained to him that these terms in fact identified the same virus. What relates these two separate visits, other than their diagnoses, was that both patients are members of our Latinx community in the Bay Area, a community that has been disproportionately ravaged by this pandemic. Being Latino myself, and speaking native Spanish, it is one of my favorite
“Latinos account for 34 percent of the cases of COVID-19 nationwide, while only representing 18 percent of the U.S. population.” parts of the job to speak with my Latinx patients in their language while caring for them in the ED. Unfortunately, as with many things during this pandemic, this joy has been turned on its head because of how much harder our Latinx community has been afflicted. We in San Francisco have been overall very fortunate to not have had the waves of COVID deaths that other localities have experienced across the country. But what we have seen is the severe ethnic/racial disparities exacerbated by the pandemic. Per data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Latinos account for 34 percent of the cases of COVID-19 nationwide,
while only representing 18 percent of the U.S. population. In California, the data is even more stark with Latinx individuals accounting for greater than 56 percent of cases and 45.9 percent of deaths while only representing 39 percent of the population. Within my own community of San Francisco, this disparity is corroborated by a recent University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) study which found that 95.1 percent of those testing positive for COVID-19 self-identified as Latinx while only representing 40 percent of those tested — an almost unimaginable proportion. This data, however, is likely not that surprising if you have been working
