The great miseries that the coronavirus uncovers

Connecting every night, Spanish time, with the big American television networks has the advantage of knowing in real time the contradictions with which President Donald Trump has faced the pandemic. Also, to contemplate the great effort of governors like the one of the state of New York, Andrew Cuomo, and, of course, those who fight in the first line of risk the unbridled advance of the coronavirus. However, what strikes me personally most is an aspect to which these media now devote greater attention: the enormous inequalities that are manifested by this tragedy. 

African Americans and Latinos are the biggest victims of the pandemic. It is no longer a secret that the public health system in the United States is severely underfunded, and that it is only those who cannot afford to pay the astronomical bills for private medical treatment that end up having access to it. The result is that just one month after Trump backed drastic measures, the black population is infected three times more than the white population and six times more people die. These are figures from a report published by The Washington Post, which expressly cites cases such as those in the states of Louisiana and Wisconsin, as well as in large cities such as Chicago or Detroit, to put the number of African-American deaths at 65-73% when the population is around 18-30% in those territories. 

Latinos or Hispanics are, in turn, the second most punished, especially in New York, which already holds the world record for the number of deaths in relation to its population of twenty million souls. Twenty-nine per cent of them are Hispanic, but with 34 per cent of the dead. 

African Americans and Latinos are therefore the main focus of transmission and also of victims of the pandemic, a consequence of their chronic pathologies due to lack of primary medical care, and of their own precarious living conditions. In the case of the black population, this translates into very high rates of diabetes, HIV, asthma, obesity and heart disease. It is also the largest racial group by far in the United States' prisons. Obviously, prisons are not exactly the best environment to fight a pandemic like the coronavirus. 

Hispanics, the second largest racial group in terms of the number of prisoners, have narrowed the gap with African Americans in this sad classification, thanks to the measures to hunt and capture undocumented immigrants, already adopted by President Barack Obama and intensified by his successor. Instead, they are the ones who occupy the most exposed jobs in these days of confinement: home delivery workers, supermarket and department store stockists, guards and nurses. The many hotel and catering workers, who, in most cases, only collected tips from customers, have had their services terminated without access to unemployment benefits. They have been left destitute and at the expense of charity. Looking at the specific case of New York, all of the above would explain why as of last week there were 700 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in the Queens neighborhood while there were only 376 in Manhattan. Teleworking has become the norm on the island, but only one in five Latinos has the means and the employment to do so. 

Among the daily appearances from the White House, I have been particularly struck by those of Anthony Fauci, who is currently the country's top health authority, and whom Trump has not yet fired. Fauci, in addition to reporting with great honesty on the scientific fight against the virus and the consequent measures, both the most appropriate and those that have proven to be wrong, has not hesitated to acknowledge that racial, economic and social disparities in the United States aggravate the incidence of the pandemic. 

Even though Donald Trump has made remarkable efforts to monopolize the story, this artificial construction of a mental framework and an argument to cover up failures or to enhance the minimum successes of those in power, the American media daily reveals uncomfortable and undeniable realities. And perhaps the worst of them is the permanence of what some social researchers define as “structural racism”. A scourge that has not been eradicated, and which the coronavirus tsunami is blatantly exposing.