Black People Are Dying Of COVID-19 At Alarming Rates. Here's Why.
DETROIT — Greg Bowens stopped counting when seven people he knew well had died of COVID-19. New names kept coming up on his social media feed, day after day.
“How is it possible that I would know this many people who had died?” Bowens, a 55-year-old public relations professional and founder of the Grosse Pointe/Harper Woods NAACP Branch, recalled thinking to himself.
That was before Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services started releasing official data showing the racial breakdown of cases and deaths on April 2. That data showed that, although just 14% of the population of Michigan is Black, 33% of coronavirus cases and 41% of deaths were in the Black community. It was little surprise to Bowens and other African Americans in Detroit, who had been witnessing the people around them falling sick and dying for several weeks.
The metro area’s first high-profile African American death was Marlowe Stoudamire, a well-connected business consultant, on March 26. Then there was a popular high school basketball coach. School district employees. A city bus driver who had taken to social media to complain about a passenger coughing on him. One woman lost her aunt the same day she rushed her mother and grandmother to the emergency room. Her grandmother died a week later. Her mother is on a ventilator and is expected to recover.
The state’s data is incomplete, as 30% of cases do not list the person’s race. But a nearly complete data set from Washtenaw County showed a similar trend, with African Americans accounting for 49% of hospitalizations but only 12.3% of the population.
In Michigan, it’s not just Detroit. And it’s not just poverty. Though Detroit is 80% Black with a poverty rate of roughly 35% ― more than triple the national average ― other, more affluent suburbs with substantial African American populations are also getting hit hard.
“Black people who are middle class and upper-middle class are getting this and dying,”...
