As the novel coronavirus pandemic takes an ever-increasing toll on the United States, it’s now widely publicized that COVID-19 deaths haven’t been experienced evenly across all segments of the population. Across the country, Black people are dying from the disease at disproportionately high rates. One of the first researchers to identify the severity of this trend was Dr. Clyde W. Yancy, chief of cardiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Yancy has studied cardiovascular health disparities for decades and hopes the current crisis will be a catalyst for major public policy and values shifts in our society.
In Chicago, where only about a third of the population is Black, more than half of the people who’ve died of COVID are Black. Has anything caught your eye about how these disparities are playing out here?
First, this crisis has dramatically highlighted not just the presence of another disparity but the extent of this disparity. COVID-19 has removed the Band-Aid from our health disparities environment and demonstrated how deep the wound is. [The] second thing is that the loss of life, the human toll involved here, is compelling. I believe that in a civil society there’s a pain point beyond which we are uncomfortable tolerating such disproportionate suffering.
It sounds like you’re optimistic about the possibility that this is one of those threshold moments. You don’t think that the fact that COVID victims are disproportionately Black will actually make it less likely that there would be this necessary response? There’s a history in this country of treating problems seen as Black people’s problems as not that urgent.
Do you think that discrimination against Black people in the medical establishment is becoming more visible as a result of this crisis?
In a recent New York Times Magazine article you noted how tragic it was that a traditional Mardi Gras gathering of Black men in New Orleans became a hot spot for the spread of the virus there. Do you have any thoughts about the way the public discussion has been happening around these house parties in Chicago that have been presented as gatherings of young Black people? Are they being depicted fairly?
