Was COVID Exacerbated by the Income Gap💵

        My week has been one of trials and tribulations. As an educator many of my colleagues returned to school; I was not one of them. I have been placed in the Providence Virtual Learning Academy (PVLA) due to my asthma, which under CDC Guidelines determines that I am at risk. However, since school began this virtual academy has laid testament to the gross inadequacies and inequalities that currently exist in our society and public education system. I can work from home, many cannot. 

    As of last year 2019, Providence had a student enrollment of 24,336 students. Out of that number, 65.8% are Hispanic and 16.2% are Black. COVID is affecting these two populations the worse. As of today there has been 86 new cases and the Providence municipality has some of the highest recorded cases. So one would ask, why did Providence Public Schools open? They opened, in my opinion due to politics, but this isn't what this post is about. In the article, Thinking About Racial Disparities in COVID-19 Impacts Through a Science-Informed, Early Childhood Lens it was stated that people of color are under-testing at lower rates. Could this be true and not just Gina and Co fudging the numbers😱 I am not going to spend the entire time talking about how schools should be places of respite rather than fear. That will be my next blog post.      

    The United States according to the film In Sickness and Wealth  the US has a GDP of over 2 trillion, yet 47 million Americans have no healthcare. At one time I was one of them. I almost died in college from sepsis because I got a staph infection in my finger and was afraid to go to Health Services because of the bill. It is apparent, as alluded to in the Whitehall Study there are "social determiners" that affect this so-called excess death. Just like in Louisville, KY and New Orleans, LA areas that are less affluent are more susceptible to major health issues and lower life expectancy. I am also drawn back to Green's article Coronavirus Strikes Latino Families Near Salton Sea. I knew about the Salton Sea prior to the reading because I was interested in this so-called "oasis in the California desert" that dried up and essentially became a toxic wasteland. I never thought about how environmental issues could lead to an exacerbation of COVID related deaths among minority communities. I am fearful for my students of color that have issues and are being sent back to sick buildings. 

This is blatantly obvious in Crenshaw's article appropriately titled When Blackness Is A Preexisting Condition, in that one of the truths lay bare from Hurricane Katrina was the deadly intersection of race and class. I try to not be overtly political, however, Katrina and COVID-19 happened under republican administrations. I still recall asking my mother as a young child about the two party system and she exclaimed Republicans "are for the rich" and Democrats "for the poor." However, we continue to see this disproportion of people of color that is more obvious during times of crisis. I found the rate of COVID deaths in the article "majority-Black counties faced three times the COVID-19 infection rate and nearly six times the mortality rate from the virus. I was reminded in the articles of when the pandemic first hit, especially in New York trailers of bodies of people of color that had died of COVID-19. These raw images are not different than those of Mrs. Freeman and other Katrina fatalities, many people of color. The image has been permanently imprinted into my brain, just as much as the first time I visited New York Harbor. My heart ached for the Big Apple. I worry that the New York I've come to love will be something only of a distant memory.  

Bring in COVID. My hometown, Providence is no exception. COVID has ravaged cities and being low in-come means more risk. So will my students and colleagues of color die in these schools? Are they just political collateral damage? According to the film, there is a direct correlation to stress and contracting COVID like the "monkey" study, where in low-income communities of color "stress responses" are more heightened because many live day to day and don't know what is next to come. This brings me to my students of color. We live in a capitalistic society, the character of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street speaks in my head and he whispers "greed for the lack of a better word is good!" Well Gordon, greed is not benefiting me nor my students, who identify as the 99%. Just yesterday I read about how the pandemic has started a fashion trend with mask wearing. Even major fashion houses like Luis Vuitton are jumping on the bandwagon. See photo below. 

    All kidding and complaining aside and longing for a good Netflix and Chill re-watch of Wall street, COVID is no longer the invisible enemy, but a real threat to the future of our urban communities. COVID like the pandemic of 1918 will come and go, however it is the lasting effects and the realities of the real health issues and lack of care in communities of color. In our schools!!! Maybe COVID will be a good thing and lead to more progressive action. Maybe people will continue to retreat into the suburbs and abandon the cities. The same cities and suburbs that became divided as products of the New Deal through redlining aka state sponsored segregation. I think of my husbands hometown of Chicago where there is a Northside and a Southside. Issues exist beyond baseball, division isn't if your a White Sox or Cubs fan. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaPQN0aW47I

I end this evening with the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald from his novel the Great Gatsby, the sound of Jazz playing in my head “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”