Anti-Racism and COVID-19 Epidemiology

I was thrilled to see our paper, "Reparations for Black American descendants of persons enslaved in the U.S. and their potential impact on SARS-CoV-2 transmission," published in Social Science & Medicine this month. This was a huge team effort organized by former PhD student Gene Richardson. The Harvard press service did a nice write-up of the paper here.

The paper basically argues that structural racism makes crises like the COVID-19 pandemic worse. We note that Black Americans suffer from a disproportionate incidence of COVID-19 infection and suggest that this disparity is driven by structural racism. As noted by economist (and co-author) Sandy Darity, there is a persistent wealth gap between Black and White Americans and that a major consequence of this is far lower home-ownership rates among Black Americans. Using census data, we show that Black residents of the state of Lousiana are twice as likely as non-Black residents to live in over-crowded housing, leading to likely higher secondary attack rates of the virus within Black households. We then use a simple formalism for an epidemic in a multi-host population to show the consequences for this type of structuring on the basic reproduction number, R₀. The elasticity of  R0 is greatest for reductions in transmission within the Black subcomponent of the overall population. We then ask about the counterfactual scenario where Black Americans are not more likely to live in over-crowded housing or work frontline jobs. Such a scenario seems a reasonable consequence of reparations payments. We suggest that a reparative program would have substantially decreased R₀ for the population, reducing the overall burden of disease and making control generally easier.

We've received a lot of positive feedback on this work, but there's also been a disturbing amount of hate mail. The ironic lesson I draw from this is that if you are skeptical about the existence of structural racism in American society, you just need write something arguing for its existence in some high-visibility outlet. The swiftness and the intensity of the hate you will receive should rid you of your skepticism. We have a lot of work to do to make our country live up to its high ideals...

• Richardson, E.T., M.M. Malik, W.A. Darity, A.K. Mullen, M.E. Morse, M. Malik, A. Maybank, M.T. Bassett, P.E. Farmer, L. Worden, and J.H. Jones. 2021. Reparations for American Descendants of Persons Enslaved in the U.S. and their Potential Impact on SARS-CoV-2 Transmission. Social Science & Medicine. 113741. (doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113741)