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Just about everyday there’s more news about COVID-19’s Delta variant — an adaptation of the virus that is said to be more dangerous and more transmissible.
Yale Medicine reported that the Delta variant was discovered in India this past December. As of now, it’s spread across the globe and is currently the dominant strain of COVID-19 plaguing the United States.
While it’s was expected that the virus would change and adapt over time, the Delta virus is being pinned as a particular threat since at the end of last month World Health Organization officials marked it as “the most able and fastest and fittest of those viruses.”
According to John Hopkins, about 82% of new COVID cases are the Delta variant, and that directly correlates with the fact that the number of COVID cases in our country is also back on the rise.
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Dr. Elaine Batchlor, the president of one of the leading medical institutions in L.A. (called the Martin Luther King Community Healthcare), told The Grio that there’s an unfortunate tie between the dangerous variant and the Black community.
“Unfortunately, the Black community is lagging behind in COVID vaccination and as a result, is experiencing higher rates of infection and hospitalization,” Batchlor told the outlet. “Let’s not allow this terrible disease to decimate our community again.”
Black women are especially vulnerable regarding the rate of COVID mortality. An analysis conducted by Harvard explored how the intersectionality of race and gender coincided with the virus’ death rates and confirmed that Black people were dying at higher rates than their white counterparts — with Black women being three times more likely to die from the virus than white men and Asian men respectively.
As MADAMENOIRE has extensively reported on over the last several months, the mortality numbers aren’t the only way Black women have been uniquely harmed by the impact of the virus. Notably, the health of pregnant women (and particularly Black pregnant women due to their already high maternal mortality rates) has not been prioritized in the COVID vaccine’s rollout.
Black women are one of the most impacted minorities noted by job loss 2020 statistics which revealed that since the virus’ onslaught, Black women also filed for bankruptcy at “distressing” rates because of the pandemic.
MADAMENOIRE also covered how systematic racism and biases within public health have played a factor in Black women and the community as a whole being disproportionally affected by COVID. Read that here.
