“A life lost to COVID is a life that matters,” Foster said. “And we can focus on the people who are vulnerable without making this about race. Making it about race only obscures the actual issue.”
Kmele Foster, host of the The Fifth Column podcast, joined Bill Maher on Friday night to talk about the COVID-19 racial disparity being used to set policy on either vaccine distribution or COVID mitigation efforts.
"We know," Foster said, "that the most vulnerable population when it comes to COVID are older people. That if I took people over the age of 55, 80 percent of the deaths. There have been actual conversations about prioritizing people on the basis of their race, because COVID is said to disproportionately impact black people relative to white people. It is a ridiculous proposition."
Truthteller @kmele laying it down on Bill Maher about "equity" programs in Covid distribution and how what we're seeing there is a "ridiculous proposition" that we hear from governors, in the NYT, and, though he doesn't mention it, in medical journals. pic.twitter.com/N4IhhcSjYc
— James Lindsay, king of your mom (@ConceptualJames)
"But it's a proposition that has found its way into the mouths of governors, Foster went on, "Here in California, the pages of The New York Times. We're actively talking about it… We actually know, when we look at the global impact of COVID, in the United States—again 80 percent of the people who are dying are older, about 18 percent of the people who are dying are black. A life lost to COVID is a life that matters. And we can focus on the people who are vulnerable without making this about race. Making it about race only obscures the actual issue."
Peter Hamby responded "if you separate race from economic insecurity, sure, but Hispanics are hospitalized at three, four times the rate of white people for a variety of reasons." He listed off issues like employment, transportation, and multi-family housing.
"But the important point is that it's not fundamentally about race," Foster said. "You can't unhispanic them. There may be different issues in their communities, it could be that they live in homes with more people, they could live in more urban centers, but if that's so the policy you're tailoring is for people in more urban centers, not Latinos. This is a confusion of categories that is actually distracting us from forging good policy. What you get are great sound bites. You don't actually fix problems."
The New York Times was the first outlet to assess the data of COVID death and case counts by race.
Robert Gebeloff, a data journalist for The New York Times, explained the process of New York Times data collection efforts in March. He spoke to Michael Barbaro on The Daily in July about how little data there was at the beginning, and how he and his team of data journalists worked hard to collect information on deaths and case counts from counties across the country.
Gebelhoff said that "When you're a data journalist, the fun part is doing what we call the queries, asking questions of the data and seeing what it shows. We all know, job one, is to make sure your data is good, otherwise the questions you ask won't mean anything."
After months of diligently and painstakingly collecting the data on their own, The Times got more data from the CDC. This data, Gebelhoff said, allowed the data journalists to "look at the world through these different prisms and ask different questions about how the pandemic was playing out."
The CDC data, for 1.5 million Americans, representing 88 percent of the cases through the end of May 2020, allowed them to ask demographic questions. It was gathered from health forms that were collected from local health agencies, that these forms would have "characteristics of the case," such as age, race, if the person was working or staying home, and what their symptoms were.
Upon examination of this data, Gebelhoff and his team found three trends, and they were all about race: it's what they were looking for. "The first," he said, was just how pervasive the racial disparity was with this pandemic."
This, he said, had primarily to do with the vast majority of the cases being in urban centers. Gebelhoff and his team looked at what was driving these disparities, to obtain the second takeaway. As Foster said Friday night on Bill Maher, housing, occupation, and also comorbidities were the drivers.
"The third takeaway from this is what you learn by looking at the pandemic through the prism of age," Gebelhoff said. "Right now, most of what we know about the disparity is all cases of people of all age groups and that's how the rates are calculated.
"But if you realize something about this pandemic it's that older people are far more likely to get sick and die. And in the US right now, the older population is very disproportionately white, non-hispanic. So if you don't account for age, you're by definition almost understating the disparity. So what we did, what some epidemiologists call 'age-adjusting,' is looked at infection rates across age groups. And when you look at, say, what the infection rate is for people who are in their 40s or in their 50s, the disparity is much bigger than you'll ever see in numbers without age adjustment.
"If you look at some of the younger age groups, the death rate for Latinos is about ten times higher than that for whites. Now, the caveat to that is that you're much, much less likely to die at those age groups, but it's still, among the people who do die at those age groups, it's very heavily black and Latino."
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