Trump-Republican Policies are Killing Black People during the COVID-19 Pandemic
We have it totally under control. It’s going to be just fine. — Donald Trump, January 22
The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. — Donald Trump, February 24
I think we’re going to get through it very well. — Donald Trump, March 11
[The Trump administration] waited two months. . . . And those two months have meant the difference between many tens of thousands of Americans dying who might otherwise not have died. — Susan Rice, national security adviser to Barack Obama
There is wide acknowledgement that Donald Trump has failed catastrophically in his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And, shockingly, his administration continues to fail. The Trump administration continues to play petty politics with the pandemic instead of following the expert advice on what is needed to address the crisis. Many thousands of lives are being lost, disproportionately African American lives.
While people of all races are dying because of the callousness and incompetence of the Trump administration on the COVID-19 crisis, I will highlight some areas where African Americans are disproportionately harmed not only by the Trump administration’s policies but also from long-standing Republican policy priorities.
The consensus among experts (see, for example, here, here, here, here, and here) is that (1) we need massively more testing for the coronavirus, (2) we need to be able to trace people who have been in contact with the infected, and (3) we need more equipment to be able to effectively treat individuals with COVID-19. We can only meet this enormous challenge if all available federal government resources are committed to the endeavor. The federal government also has to take charge of the planning and coordination of the response so that states are not needlessly competing with each other. Trump continues to ignore this advice. Each day that he fails to do these things means many thousands more Americans will die, and African Americans will be over-represented among the dead.
While Trump’s continuing failure to respond quickly and adequately to the pandemic is the major and most immediate danger to African Americans, there are other Trump-Republican policies making the crisis worse for black people.
Nearly 700,000 African Americans lack health insurance because of Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act (ACA aka Obamacare). The ACA allows states to expand Medicaid to cover more low-income individuals. Several states, because of Republican politicians, have not been able to expand Medicaid. My estimate is that, in 2018, states that expanded Medicaid had on average about four percentage-points more black people with health insurance than states that did not expand Medicaid (see Table 1 below for the analysis). This translates to nearly 700,000 black people without health insurance because of Republican opposition to expanding Medicaid.
Researchers have found that from 2014 to 2017 the failure to expand Medicaid led to nearly 16,000 deaths. Because many Southern states with large black populations did not expand Medicaid and because Medicaid serves low-income Americans who are disproportionately black, it is highly likely that the failure to expand Medicaid disproportionately cost black people their lives. With COVID-19 upon us, the lives lost from the failure to expand Medicaid is increasing.
In the past few weeks, many millions of workers have lost their jobs — and their employer-sponsored health insurance. The Trump administration, which has continually tried to undermine the Affordable Care Act, is not fully utilizing the ACA to help provide health insurance to the newly jobless. And, again, it will be black people over-represented among those who died because they did not have ACA-provided health insurance.
Investigative journalism by the Washington Post found that there have been more than three thousand complaints to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) already this year about employers failing to establish safety policies to protect workers from the coronavirus. We can be certain that the number of formal complaints to OSHA represents only a small fraction of the true extent of the problem. In spite of these complaints, and requests from unions and members of Congress, Trump’s OSHA has refused to require that employers follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s safety guidelines.
African American workers are over-represented among America’s essential workers. They are over-represented among grocery store, transit, and healthcare workers — workers at high risk of contracting the virus. When Trump’s OSHA fails to protect workers from the coronavirus, it is disproportionately putting black workers at risk.
Republicans have long opposed and blocked policies to address climate change and to clean up our air. New research links long-term exposure to air pollution to higher COVID-19 death rates. Dr. John R. Balmes, a spokesperson for the American Lung Association, said that the study’s findings were particularly important for communities of color, which tend to be exposed to higher levels of air pollution. Trump-Republican anti-environmental policies are also policies that put black people at risk of dying from COVID-19. Even after the release of this new research, on April 14, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency rejected recommendations to require cleaner air standards.
When campaigning, Donald Trump likes to ask African Americans what do they have to lose in voting for him. African Americans can now give the answer, “our lives.”
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