At a glance:
New study suggests monetary reparations for Black descendants of people enslaved in the United States could have cut SARS-CoV-2 transmission and COVID-19 rates both among Black individuals and the population at large.
Researchers modeled the impact of structural racism on viral transmission and disease impact in the state of Louisiana.
The higher burden of SARS-CoV-2 infection among Black people also amplified the virus's spread in the wider population.
Reparations could have reduced SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the overall population by as much as 68 percent.
Compared with white people, Black individuals in the United States are more likely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, more likely to end up in the hospital with COVID-19, and more likely to die from the disease.
Civil rights activists have long called for monetary reparations to the Black descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States as a financial, moral, and ethical form of restitution for the injustices of slavery.
Now, a study led by Harvard Medical School researchers suggests reparations could also have surprising public health benefits for Black individuals and the entire nation.
To estimate the impact of structural inequities between Black and white individuals, the researchers set out to capture the effect of reparation payments on the Black-white wealth gap in the state of Louisiana.
Their analysis, published online on Feb. 9 in Social Science & Medicine, suggests that if reparations had been made before the COVID-19 pandemic, transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the state's overall population could have been reduced by anywhere from 31 percent to 68 percent.
The work was done in collaboration with the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice.
"While there are compelling moral and historical arguments for racial-injustice interventions such as reparations, our study demonstrates that repairing the damage caused by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow racism would have enormous benefits to the entire population of the United States," said study senior author Eugene Richardson, assistant professor of global health and social medicine in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School.
read more:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-02/hms-srf021121.php
Replies