By Danny R. Johnson/National News Editor
LOS ANGELES–Steve Harvey, host of The Steve Harvey Morning Show, a national radio program which is currently broadcast from Los Angeles, said on his Wednesday, April 22 broadcast: “African Americans in Atlanta and other major cities in the south should never fall for the okey-doke and follow Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s push to open up certain businesses on Friday.”
Kemp, a Republican and an ally of President Trump, just called for the reopening within days of his state’s gyms, fitness centers, bowling alleys, body-art studios, barbers, nail salons, cosmetologists, aestheticians, beauty schools, massage therapists, theaters, private social clubs and dine-in restaurants. He’s doing this even though the state ranks near last in testing, even though it’s not clear that covid-19 cases are declining there, and even knowing “we’re probably going to have to see our cases continue to go up,” as Kemp himself said.
Harvey went on to state emphatically and passionately that he truly believes “Kemp and other southern governors want to use blacks as lab specimens to see how many will die…and then when a sizable number of black folks die…they will pull back and say it’s too soon to open and let’s pull back.”
Harvey and other celebrities such as Spike Lee, Oprah Winfrey, Al Sharpton, agree with public health experts who fear coronavirus will burn through Georgia’s African American community – mainly Atlanta. But Kemp is betting on a big gamble that his constituents wouldn’t want to swab places with anyone, and that tourists will be dying to get to Georgia in any class of travel — economy, economy plus or intensive care — as the Peachtree State remakes itself as the state with highest Covid 19 deaths among African Americans. A recent Washington Post article showed how African Americans think about Kemp’s new push to open up so quickly.
An African American man in his 50s had contracted coronavirus and was having trouble breathing when he arrived at an urgent care facility in Atlanta’s Grady Hospital last week. The emergency room physician told him he needed to get further medical treatment.
“I’m not staying in here and let Kemp kill me,” the man responded, the physician recalled in an interview with the reporter interviewing him. “I’d rather go home, cause I know at least at home I’m safe.” The man left the facility with clear instructions from the physician, but he said he doesn’t know where he ended up.
For this physician and others across the country who treat people of color in the urban cities of America, the patient’s response has become disturbingly common among African American and Latino patients, including many he’s been treating on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic. Generations of distrust in the health care system have accumulated particularly among African Americans but also Latinos, he said — a long-standing issue based on a history of medical abuses dating to slavery that’s now burst to the fore, with dangerous consequences.
Kemp’s desire to the return of bowling leagues is bound to increase the strike rate among those who participate particularly African Americans, leaving relatively few to spare. Reopened theaters will show reruns of several R-naught rated features, such as “Contagion,” “Outbreak” and “Carriers.”
Diners will crowd into wet-market-to-table restaurants to experience a growing sampling of zoonotic dishes (ACE2 proteins offered for vegans), and mixologists will experiment with heart-stopping cocktails of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.
As “private social clubs” reopen, the Elks and Lions will develop herd immunity, while Legionnaires will flourish.
Cosmetologists, again among the essential workers, will help the citizens of Georgia replace their N95s with exfoliating facial masks guaranteed to enhance viral shedding.
It has been 88 years since Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis developed the idea of states serving as “laboratories of democracy.” But even that great thinker probably couldn’t have imagined states serving as actual laboratories, experimenting with the spread of infectious diseases in their populations.
Now several Republican governors, with Trump’s encouragement, are racing to reopen during the pandemic, using their constituents as lab rats to see what happens when you relax virus containment. Talk about poor modeling. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster has opened many retail stores and lifted restrictions on beaches. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida will take reopening recommendations from a task force that includes Disney and Universal Studios. Texas, Tennessee and others are joining the race to become death destinations.
But nobody is as far out there as Kemp. Jimmy Carter, who served as Georgia’s governor before becoming president, may have been a peanut farmer. But Kemp is an actual nut. Earlier this month, when he announced one of the last stay-at-home orders in the nation, he stated that he hadn’t known “until the last 24 hours” that asymptomatic people could spread the coronavirus. This had been known for a couple of months to anyone paying attention.
But Kemp is not without guile. As Georgia’s secretary of state, he purged half a million names from voting rolls — then beat his opponent for governor, Stacy Abrams, by only 55,000 votes. Now he seems to have embarked on a new purge: inducing his African American constituents to once again shuffle off this mortal coil. Perhaps he should abandon all pretense and turn his reopening into a parade and festival?
In Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, where African Americans account for 42 percent of the coronavirus cases and 57 percent of deaths, the health department has heard concerns that traditional modes of messaging are not reaching black people.
“We are making a concerted effort to improve communications with targeted public service announcements created by ‘influencers’ in the African American community,” said Dr. Benjamin Weston, medical director for Milwaukee County. “That critical messaging is: Stay at home.”
SOMOS Community Care, a network of immigrant physicians, is working with New York state government to treat and educate Latino and Chinese immigrant populations. Its mobile testing sites are trilingual. And the network is working to educate people online and on Univision — informing Latinos about what telehealth is, how to get tested and the cost of treatment.
“Our people do not trust institutions,” Henry Munoz, co-founder of SOMOS Community care, said of Latinos. “That’s the No. 1 thing: A hospital is intimidating to people.”
The historic distrust among Latinos and African Americans is affecting willingness to seek treatment as coronavirus spreads.
“There is a very complicated and very deep history where the health care system is not really seen as a safe place for black people,” Sidney Wilbourn, a doctor in Brooklyn, said, “and it’s something we can’t ignore.”
The history of distrust among the majority of most southern African Americans, goes back to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and 19th century gynecologist J. Marion Sims, who experimented on enslaved black women. It’s also the result of racial health inequities, including high maternal mortality rates among black women, playing out for generations without being addressed by the government or private health systems.
“Remember that distrust is a symptom of the real reason: structural racism,” commented Wilbourn.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention told POLITICO news last week that educational outreach to minority populations is a “major priority” for the agency. Currently, CDC is reviewing new web content for racial and ethnic minority groups. Also, in the works are social media campaigns, culturally relevant graphics and illustrations, and a public service announcement for the African American community, said Benjamin Haynes, a CDC spokesperson.
On April 28, the CDC will give a presentation to the National Council of Churches USA governing board meeting, virtually. The agency also is planning an April 30 coronavirus listening session with experts working on health disparities among racial and ethnic populations.
We Can’t Wait Until the Vaccine’s Here
Gregorio Millett, an epidemiologist, said early misconceptions about the coronavirus — that it would likely be confined to communities with the means to travel, or the conspiracy theory that African Americans were immune — reminded him of the early years of the HIV epidemic.
“At the very beginning of the HIV epidemic, many communities of color thought this is only a disease of white gay men. And it was to our peril because HIV eventually made its way into black and brown communities,” said Millett, vice president of the nonprofit AIDS research organization, amFar.
“The messenger matters,” Millett said.
The distrust among minority communities, though not occurring in a vacuum, could have dangerous repercussions if it continues when a coronavirus vaccine emerges, doctors and public health experts said in interviews.
During the 2018-19 flu season, 39 percent of African Americans got the seasonal vaccine, and 37 percent of Latinos. By comparison, 48 percent of whites received it, according to the CDC.
Early on in the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, Dr. Sandra Quinn studied the public’s willingness to receive a vaccine. African Americans were the most worried about taking it (62%), followed by Hispanics (52%) and whites (45%).
A conspiracy theory claiming 5G towers are the cause of the coronavirus and discouraging people from taking a future vaccine has added to Quinn’s concern.
Quinn, a professor of public health at the University of Maryland, said she’s been thinking “a lot” about how to improve trust and ensure black and Latino populations take a vaccine if and when one becomes available.
“Right now, we have low trust. We have a burden of chronic disease that puts people at increased risk. And we have these conspiracy theories,” Quinn said. “We can’t wait until the vaccine’s here. We gotta start helping people understand why you need to take the vaccine, what the process is.”
Mayors in Georgia are pushing back against Kemp’s decision.
“I have searched my head and my heart on this and I am at a loss as to what the governor is basing this decision on,” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, told CNN.
She said she is considering legal options for a city that she said is “not out of the woods yet.”
“You have to live to fight another day. And you have to be able to be amongst the living to be able to recover,” she said.
