Sharon Begley: To understand who’s dying of Covid-19 look to social factors like race more than preexisting diseases, in STAT, 15. Juni 2020.
In her article on the STAT-News page, Begely argues that the decisive factors for dying from COVID-19 are not preexisting diseases as initially assumed. In the US, people are exposed to a significantly higher risk of dying from COVID-19 due to racist ascriptions. “The higher the percentage of Black residents in a county, the higher its death rate from Covid-19 “. Begely sees the reasons for this in the qualitatively different access to the health system, but also in the effects of lifelong experiences of discrimination on the immune system. Other risk factors include work in high-risk professions that involve frequent contact with others, and poverty. Of all these factors, Black people and People of Color are particularly affected by existing systemic racism.