COVID-19 Updates: June 23, 2020
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Food Distribution Site Information |
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A Community Food Distribution event is scheduled for 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. Thursday, June 25, at Carrboro High School, 201 Rock Haven Road.
Anyone in need is welcome. The distribution is first come, first served. It is free of charge, and there are no eligibility requirements.
Due to COVID-19, distributions are held on a drive-through basis. Boxes are placed inside vehicle trunks.
Free masks will be distributed to anyone who needs them.
The event is sponsored by the Town of Carrboro and the Orange County Social Services Department.
For more information regarding this event, or food distribution sites in Orange County, please visit the following webpage. |
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Orange County info on mask distribution: - Orange Grove Fire Department will disperse masks Tuesday and Thursday for two weeks beginning Tuesday, June 23. Distribution will be from 9 a.m. - 12 a.m. at fire station No. 1 (6800 Orange Grove Road, Hillsborough).
- Orange Rural Fire Department will host a distribution on Friday, June 19 at the DSS parking lot in Hillsborough, beginning at 5 p.m. If needed, another distribution will be held next week.
- Cedar Grove Fire Department station 2 (720 Hawkins Road) will host community distribution events from 7-9 p.m. on Thursday June 25 and Thursday, July 2. Residents are asked to drive up to the front door.
- Masks will be available for pick up at White Cross Fire Department (5722 Old Greesnboro Road) Monday-Friday from 11 a.m. to Noon each day.
Chapel Hill info on mask distribution: Free mask distribution will occur every Wednesday and Saturday from 2-5 p.m. at: - Fire Station 1: 403 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, and
- Fire Station 3: 1615 E. Franklin Street
Carrboro info on mask distribution: Free masks/face coverings available for pickup - Carrboro Police Department
100 N. Greensboro St.
Monday and Friday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. - Carrboro Fire Department
Fire Station 1, 301 W. Main St. and Fire Station 2, 1411 Homestead Road
Wednesday and Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m.
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The history between healthcare and racism and its impact on our Black and Brown communities |
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Originally posted by The New York Times, Austin Frankt, Jan. 13 2020
Racial discrimination has shaped so many American institutions that perhaps it should be no surprise that health care is among them. Put simply, people of color receive less care — and often worse care — than white Americans.
Reasons includes lower rates of health coverage; communication barriers; and racial stereotyping based on false beliefs.
Predictably, their health outcomes are worse than those of whites.
African-American patients tend to receive lower-quality health services, including for cancer, H.I.V., prenatal care and preventive care, vast research shows. They are also less likely to receive treatment for cardiovascular disease, and they are more likely to have unnecessary limb amputations.
As part of “The 1619 Project,” Evelynn Hammonds, a historian of science at Harvard, told Jeneen Interlandi of The New York Times: “There has never been any period in American history where the health of blacks was equal to that of whites. Disparity is built into the system.”
African-American men, in particular, have the worst health outcomes of any major demographic group. In part, research shows, this is a result of mistrust from a legacy of discrimination.
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Tuskegee and lower life expectancy At age 45, the life expectancy of black men is more than three years less than that of non-Hispanic Caucasian men. According to a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, part of the historical black-white mortality difference can be attributed to a 40-year experiment by the U.S. Public Health Service that shook African-Americans’ confidence in the nation’s health system.
From 1932 to 1972, the Public Health Service tracked about 600 hundred low-income African-American men in Tuskegee, Ala., about 400 of whom had syphilis. The stated purpose was to better understand the natural course of the disease. To do so, the men were lied to about the study and provided sham treatments. Many needlessly passed the disease on to family members, suffered and died.
The study was publicized in 1972 and immediately halted. To this day, it is frequently cited as a driver of documented distrust in the health system by African-Americans. That distrust has helped compromise many public health efforts — including those to slow the spread of H.I.V., contain tuberculosis outbreaks and broaden provision of preventive care.
According to work by the economists Marcella Alsan and Marianne Wanamaker, black men are less likely than white men to seek health care and more likely to die at younger ages. Their analysis suggests that one-third of the black-white gap in male life expectancy in the immediate aftermath of the study could be attributed to the legacy of distrust connected to the Tuskegee study.
Their study relies on interpreting observational data, not a randomized trial, so there is room for skepticism about the specific findings and interpretation. Nevertheless, the findings are consistent with lots of other work that reveals African-Americans’ distrust of the health system, their receipt of less care, and their worse health outcomes. |
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The Tuskegee study is far from the only unjust treatment of nonwhite groups in health care. Thousands of nonwhite women have been sterilized without consent. For instance, between the 1930s and 1970s, one-third of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age were sterilized, many under coercion. Likewise, in the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of Native American women were sterilized without consent, and a California eugenics law forced or coerced thousands of sterilizations of women (and men) of Mexican descent in the 20th century. (Thirty-two other states have had such laws, which were applied disproportionately to people of color.) For decades, sickle cell disease, which mostly affects African-Americans, received less attention than other diseases, raising questions about the role of race in how medical research priorities are established.
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Outside of research, routine medical practice continues to treat black and white patients differently. This has been documented in countless ways, including how practitioners view pain. Racial bias in health care and over-prescription of opioid painkillers accidentally spared some African-Americans from the level of mortality from opioid medications observed in white populations.
“While African-Americans may not have died at similar rates from opioid misuse, we can be sure needless suffering and, perhaps even death, occurred because provider racism prevented them from receiving appropriate care and pain medication,” said Linda Goler Blount, president and chief executive of the Black Women’s Health Imperative.
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Black patients and black doctors Of course, health outcomes are a result of much more than health care. The health of people of color is also unequal to that of whites because of differences in health behaviors, education and income, to name a few factors. But there is no doubt that the health system plays a role, too. Nor is there question that a history of discrimination and structural racism underlies racial differences in all these drivers of health. Reinforcing the fact of racial bias in health care, a recent study found that care for black patients is better when they see black doctors. The study randomly assigned 1,300 African-Americans to black or nonblack primary care physicians. Those who saw black doctors received 34 percent more preventive services. One reason for this, supported by the study, is increased trust and communication. The study findings are large. If all black men received the same increase in preventive services as those in the study (and received appropriate follow-up care), it would reduce the black-white cardiovascular mortality rate by 19 percent and shrink the total black-white male life expectancy gap by 8 percent, the researchers said. But it is unlikely all black men could see black doctors even if they wished to. Although African-Americans make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, only 4 percent of current physicians — and less than 7 percent of recent medical school graduates — are black. |
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This study does not stand alone. A systematic review found that racially matched pairs of patients and doctors achieved better communication. Other studies found that many nonwhite patients prefer practitioners who share their racial identity and that they receive better care from them. They view them as better than white physicians in communicating, providing respectful treatment and being available. Racial bias in health care, as in other American institutions, is as old or older than the republic itself.Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act stipulates that neither race, color nor national origin may be used as a means of denying the “benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” As nearly every facet of the American health system receives federal financing and support, well-documented and present-day discrimination in health care suggests the law has not yet had its intended effect. |
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Black Medicare Patients With COVID-19 Nearly 4 Times As Likely To End Up In Hospital |
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Originally posted by NPR, Maria Godoy (June 22, 2020)
According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Black Americans enrolled in Medicare were hospitalized with the disease at rates nearly four times higher than their white counterparts.
Disparities were also striking among Hispanics and Asian Americans. Hispanics were more than twice as likely to be hospitalized as whites, while Asian Americans were about 50% more likely. Black and Hispanic beneficiaries were more likely to test positive for the coronavirus as well, CMS Administrator Seema Verma said.
The data "confirms long understood and stubbornly persistent disparities in health outcomes for racial and ethnic minority groups," Verma said in a press briefing Monday.
"Low socioeconomic status itself, all too often wrapped up with the racial disparities I just mentioned, represents a powerful predictor of complications from COVID-19," she added.
Previous data has already shown that older Americans in general are more likely to develop severe cases of COVID-19; but the new CMS data highlights that, even among this group, racial and health disparities are dramatic.
Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, director of the Equity Research and Innovation Center at Yale School of Medicine, calls the data on racial and ethnic health disparities "irrefutable."
"We need to recognize the urgency in this moment to expand how we think about health care's role in promoting health," she says. "As physicians and health care delivery systems, we need to prioritize addressing our patient's health related social needs such as food and housing."
The majority of Medicare beneficiaries are over 65, though the program also covers some younger people with disabilities or end-stage renal disease. Verma notes that COVID-19 has disproportionately affected people who are dually eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare, which includes both low-income older adults and some people with disabilities.
This group was more likely to be hospitalized than other Medicare beneficiaries.
People with end-stage renal disease had the highest rates of hospitalization, according to the data.
A CMS official said the agency plans to release separate data on COVID-19 and beneficiaries of Medicaid as soon as the data is complete enough for public reporting.
Overall, more than 325,000 Medicare beneficiaries were diagnosed with COVID-19 during the time period covered — from Jan. 1 through May 16, 2020 — and nearly 110,000 were hospitalized for treatment for the disease.
The CMS data, released Monday, is based off Medicare claims filed during this period, and is incomplete, CMS officials warned, because some claims for that period may not have been filed yet.
Even so, it is in line with other data that has found that COVID-19 hits communities of color particularly hard. For example, one study, published in May and based off patient records in a large California health care system, found that African-Americans are 2.7 as likely as white people to end up hospitalized with the disease. And last month, NPR's own analysis found that nationally, African-American deaths from COVID-19 are nearly two times greater than would be expected based on their share of the population.
"The new numbers released by the government reinforce what we've seen from the early stages of the pandemic — COVID is taking a disproportionate toll on black Americans, and other communities of color," wrote Tricia Neuman, executive director of the program on Medicare policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, in an e-mail. "And because COVID is harshest on older Americans, this means higher rates among black older adults than whites, higher rates of hospitalization and higher death rates."
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North Carolina COVID-19 Cases
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS) reports 54,453 COVID-19 cases, 1,251 deaths, and 915 hospitalizations, as of June 23, 2020. For more information regarding live updates (NCDHHS updates the site every morning at 11 a.m.), please visit the NCDHHS website.
Orange County Health Department also has a COVID-19 dashboard webpage, with information on COVID-19 data in the county. The dashboard will be updated every Tuesday and Thursday.
There are currently 546 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Orange County, and 41 deaths.
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COVID-19 Community Resources
For more information on COVID-19 community resources in the county, please visit our webpage. Resources on specific topic areas, such as food access, education, housing, and others, are all accessible on our website, or at the links below.
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