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#racialdisparities @PIH @InequityKills
Many have proclaimed COVID to be the great equalizer. It is not. COVID metes harsher punishment to those with so-called pre-existing conditions. Yet, the factor most associated with a shortened life span in the United States, is zip code.
Many have proclaimed COVID to be the great equalizer. It is not. COVID metes harsher punishment to those with so-called pre-existing conditions. Yet, the factor most associated with a shortened life span in the United States, is zip code.
Zip code is the pre-existing condition that will lay bare the ravages of our privatized, profit-making, fragmented health “system.” Zip code will define in large measure who lives and who dies, who gets a ventilator and who does not. @ACLU_Mass
Encoded in this measure are centuries of slavery, stolen native lands, forcibly outlined reservations, plantations never divvied into 40 acres, decades of Jim Crow, red-lining, impoverished school systems, failed public housing projects, and mass incarceration. @newjimcrowdata
Zip code is inextricably linked to the flows of labor & capital and perpetuates the inequitable status quo. While the genetic code is thought to be the key to understanding life, zip code that maps the social forces that batter the body and soul into sickness. @Data4BlackLives
It is the social determinants of health:historical and present day impoverishment, the bright lines of racism, the deepening class disparities: pre-existing social conditions--that create pre-existing medical conditions. @SocMedGlobal
This outbreak impunes our fragmented health systm. Primary care clinics,gutted over the last 30 yrs,are going bankrupt without "covered lives" to “generate revenue” despite the dire need to keep patients with pre-existing medical and social conditions well. @PNHP #MedicareForAll
Soaring unemployment is unequally hitting the most vulnerable communities--hourly workers and so-called gig workers. Social distancing is significantly harder, if not impossible for those who rely on public transport, are unhoused, or live in congregate settings. @MassJwJ
And now, as the epidemic rages, hospitals are starting to make algorithms that seek to inform rationing of increasingly scarce resources such as intensive care beds and ventilators. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/07/metro/massachusetts-officials-release-plan-ration-ventilators-icu-beds-if-need-arises/
Algorithms that inform decisions to withhold a ventilator from a person with “pre-existing conditions” will, without a doubt, cleave along the boundaries red-lined neighborhoods, reservations, detention centers, prisons and jails. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(19)30241-4/fulltext
Spaces created by racist social policies that have ring fenced communities—Black, brown and Native--from access to food, medical care, education, jobs and housing. @CamaraJones @michellemorse
Resource allocation isn't a neutral choice, it's a political choice. Rationing scarce resources without a recognition that pre-existing conditions are related to the social determinants assures racial and class divides btw who lives and who dies. @MichaelMarmot
This brutality will continue under the guise of rational decision making. But it does not have to. We must to invest now, disproportionately and in a sustained way in impoverished communities. @PIH believes in making a preferrential option for the poor.
By using emergency funds preferentially to buttress health care, housing, and food security in the poorest communities, we can fight disparities now. http://www.211.org/services/covid19
@PIH believes we must redouble our efforts to assure that testing, contact tracing, access to equitable care, and social and economic supports get to the poorest communities.
#allepidemicsarelocal We must measure our success as a society in fighting this plague with a lens of equity and justice--neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block. #InThisTogether
