The 41-year-old sanitation crew chief, who like the other members of his three-man team is African American, navigates the massive orange city truck through the narrow lanes, his mouth covered in a star-spangled bandana.
It’s one of the reasons officials say the African American community here has been so hard hit by COVID-19: While African Americans make up nearly 47% of the District of Columbia’s population, and account for 46% of the city’s COVID-19 cases, they also account for more than 76% of the city’s deaths.
Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser knows she has to both bring back business and minimize the health risk to the largely black and Latinx workers doing the work on the pandemic’s front lines.
Until this week, Washington, D.C.’s startlingly high proportion of African American deaths has helped make the city a national outlier in its stay-at-home orders.
‘This death that’s going around’
For many of the early rising members of D.C.’s sanitation crews, COVID-19 has brought both a sense of renewed pride in their crucial work and a creeping sense of dread.
