In the 1830s, New York City was hit hard by cholera, a bacterial disease usually spread through contaminated water causing an infection of the intestines. The poorest neighborhoods, including the slum known as Five Points where African Americans and immigrant Irish Catholics were the majority, were hit hardest. While modern sewage and water treatment have helped eradicate cholera in some countries, the problem was not just the lack of infrastructure: it was the presence of racism.

The Covid-19 pandemic, which claimed more than 336,000 lives in the United States in 2020, has significantly affected life expectancy, University of Southern California (USC) and Princeton University researchers have found.

In the past, racist, and sometimes dangerous, health policies and clinical experiments have targeted particularly vulnerable Black and brown communities.

Haywood County, a majority-Black community not far from Memphis, has one health department, one nursing home and no hospitals. The fatality rate of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is 50 percent higher than the state average.

Institutional racism in the United States contributes to the disproportional impact that the coronavirus pandemic has had on the Black community, the nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on Tuesday.

Understanding the set of social factors that influence health outcomes is crucial to modeling the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to University of Chicago health geographer Marynia Kolak.

America is unable to contain the surging pandemic because we refuse to reckon with the racial inequities that drive it.

When Darius Settles died from COVID-19 on the Fourth of July, his family and the city of Nashville, Tenn., were shocked. Even the mayor noted the passing of a 30-year-old without any underlying conditions — one of the city's youngest fatalities at that point.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected people of color due to legal, social, and economic inequities.

A global pandemic, economic lockdown, and enforced social distancing are hard on everyone’s mental health. Some people are especially vulnerable.

COVID-19 has had disproportionate effect on African Americans and its time to re-imagine tracing and vaccination in order to control the virus.

Race and ethnicity are risk markers for other underlying conditions that impact health — including socioeconomic status, access to health care, and increased exposure to the virus due to occupation (e.g., frontline, essential, and critical infrastructure workers).

Racial disparities in who contracts the virus have played out in big cities like Milwaukee and New York, but also in smaller metropolitan areas like Grand Rapids, Mich., where the Bradleys live. Those inequities became painfully apparent when Ms. Bradley, who is Black, was wheeled through the emergency room.

Setbacks in household wealth and the toxic stress of racism can have long-term effects, experts said.