Public health experts say the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on communities of color should be seen as an exclamation point in the national conversation about the systemic barriers to racial equality.

“It's been really demoralizing in terms of being a provider, taking care of black and brown patients that are dying from covid every day, and it's also been really frustrating seeing our political leadership not respond to some of these issues,” said Janice Blanchard, an emergency medicine physician at George Washington University Hospital.

(Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Blanchard co-authored an academic paper with nine other African American doctors in D.C. that highlights how their patients of color were more likely to die because of chronic diseases, but they have also been more likely to suffer those conditions because they lack access to healthy food, space to exercise, secure housing and regular income.

“Public health experts said the region’s trends on infections, hospitalizations and death rates are moving in the right direction, but warned those trends could reverse as more people go to restaurants, the gym or shop inside retail stores,” Rachel Chason, Dana Hedgpeth and Antonio Olivo report.

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"The Florida Department of Health in Collier County, assisted by an 11-member Doctors Without Borders team, this month stepped up testing among migrant worker communities ahead of an annual migration of Immokalee farmworkers northward to work the fields in Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia or Michigan.

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