Monthly Archives: June 2020

A woman is tested for the coronavirus at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City. Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A woman is tested for the coronavirus at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City.

Earlier in this pandemic, the shortage of tests for the coronavirus was a major problem in fighting the spread of COVID-19. The shortage was such that many hospitals and clinics would test only someone who had traveled to a country with an outbreak, had a known exposure to a positive case or showed symptoms of the disease.

But access to tests has improved significantly, and in some places, people can now get tested without having to show any symptoms at all. So if you can get tested, should you?

The answer is a little complicated. One point to clarify: We're talking here about the diagnostic or PCR test, used to diagnose people who are currently sick with COVID-19. We're not talking about antibody or antigen tests, which are different.

The short answer to the question is: Sure, get tested if you want. But the tests are not perfect, and the result will tell you only so much.

Let's say you test positive. Your doctor will likely instruct you to self-isolate at home. Since you're not showing symptoms, it could mean that you happened to be tested at just the right time and are infected with the virus but are asymptomatic. You could also be presymptomatic and develop symptoms in the coming days. The CDC says that if you continue to have no symptoms, you can end self-isolation 10 days after your test.

A positive result could also mean you were sick weeks earlier, fully recovered and are not infectious. The PCR test has sometimes shown positive results weeks after someone recovers, says Dr. Abraar Karan, a physician at Harvard Medical School: "The test could be detecting RNA [of the virus] even in people who are recovered but that doesn't mean that they're infectious."

Now let's say you test negative. That news would probably come as a relief. Perhaps you're hoping a negative result would free you to do certain activities without fear say, return to work or visit an older family member you haven't seen in months.

But Dr. Emily Landon, a hospital epidemiologist and infectious diseases specialist at University of Chicago Medicine, warns that a negative test shouldn't be seen as your ticket to stop being cautious.

"We don't know how good these tests are in individuals who don't have symptoms," she says. "We know they're pretty good at picking up COVID when it's present in people who have symptoms. But we have no idea what a negative test means in an individual that doesn't have symptoms."

"We are certain that there are people who test negative even though they are definitely contagious," she says. "A positive test can make us relatively certain that you are shedding COVID. But a negative test does not mean the opposite." It could be that you were tested too early in the disease process or that the swab didn't pick up your infection.

Landon says it takes at least three to five days after exposure to test positive. What's more, some people test positive, then negative, then positive again. Hospitals often test people with symptoms twice to try to be more certain about the finding.

The imperfections in test results have made it difficult to know how often health care workers need to be tested, she says, because a negative test doesn't mean you don't have the virus or "that you can just stop wearing your mask and not worry about it anymore."

In other words, she says, if you're getting tested to get peace of mind, a negative test shouldn't give you much peace of mind.

Nonetheless, Robert Hecht, a professor of clinical epidemiology at Yale University, offers "an encouraging thumbs-up" to anyone who decides to get tested for the virus just because.

"This idea that you should be both concerned about your own status and recognize that you can be infected without symptoms and that states should try to make more testing capacity available for people like that," he says. "I think those are all good things in general."

From a public health perspective, Landon says, there is some value in the odd asymptomatic person being tested and finding out whether they are indeed infected with the coronavirus. "It gives you a better idea of how many people are sick. It helps us to understand the test dynamics better. And anytime somebody is positive, you can remove them from the equation [of transmission]," she says, by taking precautions so they don't infect others.

But since the negative test doesn't tell you for sure that you don't have the virus, it's not a 100% guarantee that it's safe to visit your 80-year-old grandparent.

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Coronavirus Testing: Should I Go For It Even If I Have No Symptoms? : Goats and Soda - NPR

The state Department of Health Services onSunday reported 173more confirmed cases of COVID-19, the lowest in almost two weeks.

The percentage of positive tests dropped sharply from previous days, down to 2.3% the lowest point ever.

Four more people have died from the virus,significantly fewer than the number announced in any of the past few days 71 total deaths were reported between Wednesday andSaturday.

In all, 592 people have died from COVID-19 in Wisconsin as of Sunday, according to the DHS.

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The new confirmed cases bring the statewide's total to 18,403cases.More than 250,103people have tested negative for the virus.

Overall testing numbers droppedslightly7,368 results were announced Sunday, after a week that saw well over 10,000 test results on some days.

While deaths and the percentage of positive tests dropped, the number of people hospitalized for the virus remains high: 414were hospitalized as of Sunday; 133 of those patients were in intensive care.

In addition, 211 hospital patients are awaiting coronavirus test results, according to theWisconsin Hospital Association.

While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's national hospitalization data tracking about 10% of the population has shown a downward trend in hospitalization rates,Wisconsin's rate has crept slightly upward this month.

The number of people hospitalized hovered in the mid-300s even dipping below 300 for much of May before jumping to 422 last Tuesday. The number hasnot fallen below 400 since.

The breakdown of confirmed cases from DHS by county is as follows:

The statetotals are frozen once each day and might not match up-to-date county figures.

More than 6.1million cases of the virus have been confirmed across the globe, according to the Johns Hopkins University globalcasedashboard.

Contact Benita Mathew at (920) 309-3428 or bmathew@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @benita_mathew.

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Just 2.3% of new coronavirus test results in Wisconsin were positive the lowest on record - Green Bay Press Gazette

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For the past several months, the news cycle has been dominated by little other than the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Over the past week, obviously, other issues have come to the forefront.

But the novel coronavirus does not take a break for issues of social justice.

On Sunday, the Utah Department of Health reported 264 new positive cases of COVID-19 in the state the fourth consecutive day of more than 200 new cases, and the third-highest single-day total recorded in Utah since the pandemic began.

UDOH also reported one new death a male adult younger than 65 years old from Wasatch County. That now lifts Utahs death total from COVID-19 to 113.

The bulk of the new cases, as usual, came from Salt Lake County, with 124 of them coming from the states most populous area. However, Utah County also saw a sizable increase, with 59 new cases beyond the figures provided Saturday.

Worryingly, the Two-Week Cumulative Incidence Rate is now showing previously unseen hot spots in places from Logan to St. George. High rates (more than 100 cases per 100,000 people) have been established in Blanding, Logan, Monticello, north Orem, Payson, west Provo, San Juan County, St. George, Wasatch County and Washington City.

The Bear River area has shot up from 102 cases to 218 in seven days.

There has been a significant spike in new cases since May 16, when most of the state moved to the low-risk yellow category for COVID-19 restrictions, encouraging more people to leave their homes. That trend has escalated further still over the past week.

Indeed, with those four consecutive days now of 200-plus new cases, the seven-day average of new cases in the state is 200.71 the highest it has been since the pandemic began. By way of comparison, just a week ago, on May 24, the seven-day average was 164.86. And a week before that, on May 17, the average was 141.

In all, Utah has seen 1,405 new cases this past week; that compares with 1,154 last week, and 987 the week before. The weekly number of deaths decreased by one from 17 a week ago to 16 this week.

One potentially positive development is that hospitalizations in Utah have not seen an increase corresponding with the new-case totals. As of Sunday, it was reported that there 98 positive COVID-19 cases currently hospitalized. On May 24, there were 95 hospitalizations; on May 17, there were 98.

Nationwide, the figures are staggering, but perhaps also promising.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan tweeted, Marylands #COVID19 positivity rate has dropped to 10.9%, down 54.49% from its peak on April 17. Our states current total COVID-19 hospitalizations one of the states key recovery metrics have dropped to 1,183, their lowest level since April 15.

Fifty days ago, on April 12th, we lost 800 people from COVID. Yesterday, we lost 56. Sixty days ago, we had 3,400 people come into our hospitals. Yesterday, we had 191, Cuomo said. The number of lives lost is down to 56, which is in this absurd reality we live in actually very, very good news. This reduction in the number of deaths is tremendous progress. Weve gone through hell and back, and were on the other side.

Of course, given all the mass demonstrations that have erupted across the country over the past week in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, The Associated Press wrote that health experts fear that silent carriers of the virus could unwittingly infect others at protests where people are packed cheek to jowl, many without masks, many chanting, singing or shouting. The virus is dispersed by microscopic droplets in the air when people cough, sneeze, sing or talk.

Whether theyre fired up or not, that doesnt prevent them from getting the virus," Bradley Pollock, chairman of the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of California, Davis, told the AP about protesters.

By comparison, whites account for 78% of Utahs population, but just 37.2% of its COVID-19 cases as of Sunday.

And, finally, UDOH reported that the total number of Utahns tested is 213,914 meaning there is a 4.6% rate of positives. It also noted 6,137 of our cases are considered recovered. " A case with a diagnosis date of more than three weeks ago, who has not died, is considered recovered.

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Utah is averaging more than 200 new coronavirus cases a day over the past week as hot spots flare up from Logan to St. George - Salt Lake Tribune

Illustration by Joo Fazenda

There, yet again, were the flames. Before the furious conflagrations erupted in Minneapolis, the final weeks of May had already seemed like the answer to a grim math problem: What is the product of a crisis multiplied by a crisis? The official mortality count of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States swept toward a hundred thousand, while the economic toll had left forty million people out of work. It was difficult to countenance how so much misery could come about so quickly. But on Memorial Day we became video witnesses to the horrific death of George Floyd, at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. By Friday, the looted shops, the charred buildings and cars, the smoldering Third Precinctthese were evidence of what the world looks like when a crisis is cubed.

These seemingly disparate American trials are not unrelated; theyre bound by their predictability and by the ways in which the Trump Administration has exacerbated them since they began. In March, the President claimed that nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion, and he has echoed that sentiment throughout the course of the emergency. But virtually everyone paying attention to public health saw something like the novel coronavirus coming. In less than two decades, we have seen epidemics of the SARS, MERS, Ebola, and H1N1 viruses. The Obama Administration created a National Security Council Directorate to mitigate the impact of such events; the Trump Administration largely disbanded it.

On Friday, Trump tweeted that the protesters in Minneapolis were thugsa term with deep-rooted racist connotationsand later noted that the military was present in the city. When the looting starts, he warned, the shooting starts. This situation, too, is part of a long-building problem whose warning signs have gone unheeded by the current Administration. Progressives have widely criticized the 1994 Crime Bill, which was spearheaded by Joe Biden, but an element of that legislation has been underappreciated. The 1992 Los Angeles riots broke out after the acquittal of four police officers who had violently assaulted Rodney King (an incident that was also captured on video). As has often been the case with riots, the chaotic fury in Los Angeles was not simply a response to one incident but an accretion of anger at innumerable issues with a police department which had gone unaddressed for years. The Crime Bill authorized the civil-rights division of the Department of Justice to intervene in the instance of chronically troubled departments, by negotiating consent decrees that laid out specific reforms to be followed, and provided for monitors to oversee their implementation. Like the precursors to the coronavirus, Los Angelesand later Ferguson and Baltimorewas an indicator of how such problems could play out without intervention. But, in this area as well, the Trump Administration has functioned like a building contractor who cant recognize a load-bearing wall.

In July, 2017, in an address to law-enforcement officers in Suffolk County, New York, Trump told them to use more force when taking suspects into custody. Like when you guys put somebody in the car and youre protecting the head, he said. You can take the hand away, O.K.? The following May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a speech to the National Association of Police Organizations, said that the Justice Department will not malign entire police departments. We will not try to micromanage their daily work. That November, as one of his last acts on the job, Sessions issued a memorandum that severely curtailed the civil-rights divisions ability to pursue decrees with police departments. This meant that, in communities plagued with bad policing, resentments could accrue unchecked by any higher authority until they reached their detonation points. Those detonations tend to resemble the streets of Minneapolis this week.

On Thursday, in a press conference that was short on developments or new information, Erica MacDonald, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, said, To be clear, President Trump as well as Attorney General William Barr are directly and actively monitoring the investigation in this case. But what, precisely, does that mean? Barr presides over a civil-rights division that has been stripped of its chief mechanism for creating compliance among police officers. In the past five years, the Twin Cities area has seen three other controversial police shootings: of Jamar Clark, in 2015; of Philando Castile, in 2016; and of Justine Damond, in 2017. Each of these fatal incidents featured a victim of a different racial background from the officers involved, and each was highlighted as an example of police misconduct. Like the COVID cases that emerged in Seattle at the beginning of the year, Minneapolis is a study in the importance of foresight and planning, and an example of what happens when neither of those things occurs.

The President posted his the shooting starts tweet early on Friday morning, just hours before Officer Derek Chauvin, who had knelt on George Floyds neck for eight minutes, was taken into custody and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Twitter, in an unprecedented move, labelled Trumps tweet a violation of company policy against glorifying violence. A Presidential threat to have the United States military shoot civilians is the opposite of leadership, the antithesis of wisdoma comment as ill-advised and as detrimental to the public well-being as recommending injecting disinfectant or self-prescribing hydroxychloroquine.

Our problems generally do not stem from treacherous unknowns; theyre the result of a failure to make good use of what is known already. In July, 1967, after a brutal police raid at an after-hours bar in Detroit, that city exploded in retaliatory violence. A month later, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech to the American Psychological Association, in which he described riots as durable social phenomena that arise in conjunction with discernible conditionsacts of lawlessness that mirror the excesses of those charged with upholding the law. Leaders cannot predict the future, but they can be cognizant of the immediate past, and the possible dangers it suggests. They cannot be clairvoyant. They need only be intelligent.

Excerpt from:

Minneapolis, the Coronavirus, and Trumps Failure to See a Crisis Coming - The New Yorker

A medical professional administers a coronavirus test at a drive-thru testing site run by George Washington University Hospital, on May 26, 2020 in Washington, D.C. Drew Angerer/Getty Images hide caption

A medical professional administers a coronavirus test at a drive-thru testing site run by George Washington University Hospital, on May 26, 2020 in Washington, D.C.

In April, New Orleans health officials realized their drive-through testing strategy for the coronavirus wasn't working. The reason? Census tract data revealed hot spots for the virus were located in predominantly low-income African-American neighborhoods where many residents lacked cars.

In response, officials have changed their strategy, sending mobile testing vans to some of those areas, says Thomas LaVeist, dean of Tulane University's School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and co-chair of Louisiana's COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force.

"Data is the only way that we can see the virus," LaVeist says. "We only have indicators. We can't actually look at a person and tell who's been infected. So what we have is data right now."

Until a few weeks ago, racial data for COVID-19 was sparse. It's still incomplete, but now 48 states plus Washington D.C., report at least some data; in total, race or ethnicity is known for around half of all cases and 90% of deaths. And though gaps remain, the pattern is clear: Communities of color are being hit disproportionately hard by COVID-19.

Public health experts say focusing on these disparities is crucial for helping communities respond to the virus effectively so everyone is safer.

"I think it's incumbent on all of us to realize that the health of all of us depends on the health of each of us," says Dr. Alicia Fernandez, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, whose research focuses on health care disparities.

NPR analyzed COVID-19 demographic data collected by the COVID Racial Tracker, a joint project of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center and the COVID Tracking Project. This analysis compares each racial or ethnic group's share of infections or deaths where race and ethnicity is known with their share of population. Here's what it shows:

Major holes in the data remain: 48% of cases and 9% of deaths still have no race tied to them. And that can hamper response to the crisis across the U.S., now and in the future, says Dr. Utibe Essien, a health equity researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied COVID-19 racial and ethnic disparities.

"If we don't know who is sick, we're not going to know in six months, 12 months, 18, however long it takes, who should be getting the vaccination. We're not going to know where we should be directing our personal protective equipment to make sure that health care workers are protected," he says.

A heavy toll of African-American deaths

NPR's analysis finds that in 32 states plus Washington D.C., blacks are dying at rates higher than their proportion of the population. In 21 states, it's substantially higher, more than 50% above what would be expected. For example, in Wisconsin, at least 141 African Americans have died, representing 27% of all deaths in a state where just 6% of the state's population is black.

"I've been at health equity research for a couple of decades now. Those of us in the field, sadly, expected this," says Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, director of the Equity Research and Innovation Center at Yale School of Medicine.

"We know that these racial ethnic disparities in COVID-19 are the result of pre-pandemic realities. It's a legacy of structural discrimination that has limited access to health and wealth for people of color," she says.

African-Americans have higher rates of underlying conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, and lung disease, that are linked to more severe cases of COVID-19, Nunez-Smith notes. They also often have less access to quality health care, and are disproportionately represented in essential frontline jobs that can't be done from home, increasing their exposure to the virus.

Data from a recently published paper in the Annals of Epidemiology reinforces the finding that African-Americans are harder hit in this pandemic. The study from researchers at amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, looks at county-level health outcomes, comparing counties with disproportionately black populations to all other counties.

Their analysis shows that while disproportionately black counties account for only 30% of the U.S. population, they were the location of 56% of COVID-19 deaths. And even disproportionately black counties with above-average wealth and health care coverage bore an unequal share of deaths.

"There's a structural issue that's taking place here, it's not a genetic issue for all non-white individuals in the U.S.," says Greg Millett, director of public policy at amfAR and lead researcher on the paper.

Hispanics bear a disproportionate share of infections

Latinos and Hispanics test positive for the coronavirus at rates higher than would be expected for their share of the population in all but one of the 44 jurisdictions that report Hispanic ethnicity data (42 states plus Washington D.C.). The rates are two times higher in 30 states, and over four times higher in eight states. For example, in Virginia more than 12,000 cases 49% of all cases with known ethnicity come from the Hispanic and Latino community, which makes up only 10% of the population.

Fernandez has seen these disparities first-hand as an internist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. While Latinos made up about 35% of patients there before the pandemic, she says they now make up over 80% of COVID-19 cases at the hospital.

"In the early stages, when we were noticing increased Latino hospitalization at our own hospital and we felt that no one was paying attention and that people were just happy that San Francisco was crushing the curve, it felt horrendous," she says. "It felt as if people were dismissing those lives. ... It took people longer to realize what was going on."

People get free COVID-19 tests without needing to show ID, doctor's note or symptoms at a drive-through and walk up Coronavirus testing center located in Arlington, Va., on May 26th. Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

People get free COVID-19 tests without needing to show ID, doctor's note or symptoms at a drive-through and walk up Coronavirus testing center located in Arlington, Va., on May 26th.

Like African-Americans, Latinos are over-represented in essential jobs that increase their exposure to the virus, says Fernandez. Regardless of their occupation, high rates of poverty and low wages mean that many Latinos feel compelled to leave home to seek work. Dense, multi-generational housing conditions make it easier for the virus to spread, she says.

The disproportionate share of deaths isn't as stark for Latinos as it is for African-Americans. Fernandez says that's likely because the U.S. Latino population overall is younger nearly three-quarters are millennials or younger, according to data from the Pew Research Center. But in California, "when you look at it by age groups, [older] Latinos are just as likely to die as African-Americans," she says.

Other racial groups

While data for smaller minority populations is harder to come by, where it exists, it also shows glaring disparities. In New Mexico, Native American communities have accounted for 60% of cases but only 9% of the population. Similarly, in Arizona, at least 136 Native American have died from COVID-19, a striking 21% of deaths in a state where just 4% of the population are Native American.

In several states Asian Americans have seen a disproportionate share of cases. In South Dakota, for example, they account for only 2% of the population but 12% of cases. But beyond these places, data can be spotty. In Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, Asian Americans and Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders are counted together, making comparison to census data difficult.

Fernandez points out that if COVID-19 demographic reporting included language, public health officials might see differences among different Asian groups, such as Vietnamese or Filipino Americans. "That's what's going to allow public health officials to really target different communities," she says. "We need that kind of information."

Understanding the unknowns

Months into the pandemic, painting a national picture of how minorities are being affected remains a fraught proposition, because in many states, large gaps remain in the data.

For instance, in New York state until recently the epicenter of the the U.S outbreak race and ethnicity data are available for deaths but not for cases. In Texas, which has a large minority population and a sizable outbreak, less than 25% of cases and deaths have race or ethnicity data associated with them.

There are also still concerns about how some states are collecting data, says Christopher Petrella, director of engagement for the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. For example, he says West Virginia which claims to have race data for 100% of positive cases and 82% of deaths only reports three categories: white, black and "other."

Also, some states appear to be listing Hispanics under the white category, says Samantha Artiga, director of the Disparities Policy Project at Kaiser Family Foundation.

"There's a lot of variation across states in terms of how they report the data that makes comparing the data across states hard, as well as getting a full national picture," Artiga says.

But experts fear that the available data actually undercounts the disparity observed in communities of color.

"I think we have the undercount anyway, because we know that minority communities are less likely to be tested for COVID-19," says Millett. NPR's own analysis found that in four out of six cities in Texas, testing sites were disproportionately located in whiter communities. Millet points to a recent study, released pre-peer review, that found that when testing levels went up in disadvantaged neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Chicago and New York City, so too did the evidence of the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on these communities.

A registered nurse draws blood to test for COVID-19 antibodies at Abyssinian Baptist Church in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City on May 14. Churches in low income communities across New York are offering COVID-19 testing to residents. Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A registered nurse draws blood to test for COVID-19 antibodies at Abyssinian Baptist Church in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City on May 14. Churches in low income communities across New York are offering COVID-19 testing to residents.

Lawmakers have raised concern about the way the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports racial and ethnic data; the agency didn't report on demographics early on in the crisis, and even now it updates it weekly but with a one- to two-week lag. Democratic senators Patty Murray of Washington and Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr., of New Jersey called a recent report on demographics the CDC submitted to Congress "woefully inadequate."

"The U.S. response to COVID-19 has been plagued by insufficient data on the impact of the virus, as well as the federal government's response to it," Murray and Pallone wrote in a letter sent May 22 to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. They called on the Trump administration to provide more comprehensive demographic data.

A tailored public health response

Essien says he's heard concerns from colleagues that by focusing on race and ethnicity in the disease, "some of the empathy for managing and treating is going to go away."

"If people feel like, 'Well, this is a them problem and not a me problem ... then that may potentially affect the way that people think about the opening up of the country," he says.

But unless testing and other resources are directed now to communities that need them most, the pandemic will go on for everyone, says Nunez-Smith.

"This is important for everyone's health and safety," she says.

Nunez-Smith says race and ethnicity data is necessary for officials to craft tailored public health responses.

"For many people, physical distancing is a privilege," she says. "If you live in a crowded neighborhood or you share a household with many other people, we need to give messaging specific to those conditions. If you need to leave home for work every day, if you need to take public transportation to get to an essential frontline job, how can you keep safe?"

A tailored public health response is already happening in Louisiana, where LaVeist says his task force has recently recruited celebrities like Big Freedia, a pioneer of the New Orleans hip-hop subgenre called bounce, to counter misinformation and spread public health messages about COVID-19 to the African-American community.

Given the pandemic's disparate toll on communities of color, in particular low-income ones, Fernandez and Nunez-Smith say the public health response should include helping to meet basic needs like providing food, wage supports and even temporary housing for people who get sick or exposed to the virus.

"We have to guarantee that if we recommend to someone that they should be in quarantine or they should be in isolation, that they can do so safely and effectively," Nunez-Smith says.

Nunez-Smith says if you don't direct resources now to minority communities that need them most, there's a danger they might be less likely to trust and buy into public health messaging needed to stem the pandemic. Already, polls show widespread distrust of President Trump among African-Americans, and that a majority of them believe the Trump administration's push to reopen states came only after it became clear that people of color were bearing the brunt of the pandemic.

Fernandez notes that among Latinos, distrust could also hamper efforts to conduct effective contact tracing, because people who are undocumented or in mixed-status families may be reluctant to disclose who they've been in contact with.

"This is a terrible time for all of us who do health equity work," says Fernandez, "partly because this is so predictable and partly because we're standing here waving our arms saying, 'Wait, wait. We need help.' "

Connie Hanzhang Jin, Alice Goldfarb and Selena Simmons-Duffin contributed to this report.

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Growing Data Show Blacks And Latinos Bear The Brunt Of COVID-19 : Shots - Health News - NPR