Majority black counties already account for more than half of all coronavirus cases in the US and nearly 60% of deaths.
While the coronavirus had already disproportionately affected black Americans because of the prevalence of underlying health issues such as obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes, the pandemic has also exposed existing racial inequities in the US healthcare and labor system.
Black people are twice as likely to lack health insurance compared with their white counterparts, and more likely to live in medically underserved areas where they face health facility closures and caps on public health plans.
Dr Mary Bassett, the director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center of Health and Human Rights at Harvard, rejected selectively opening communities considered less Covid susceptible, noting that fuels biases that result in unequal treatment for black Americans during a pandemic.
According to YouGov, a London-based research and analytics group, black Americans are twice as likely as white people to know someone who died from Covid-19.
