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Counties with the highest percentage of White residents have had the lowest rates of coronavirus infections, even as infections have increased with the reopening of some states’ economies, an indication that residential segregation is a significant factor in the pandemic’s spread, a study has concluded.
That doesn’t mean White people have more immunity but rather that they have been better able to limit their exposure than have Black people, Latinos and Native Americans, who have been disproportionately infected by the novel coronavirus and killed by covid-19, the disease the virus causes.
Neither does it mean that people of color are engaging in reckless behavior, the study by Amfar states. Rather, their higher rate of infection is due to “poverty and living in densely occupied households, living in localities with greater air pollution, lack of health insurance and being employed in jobs that increase exposure to” the coronavirus.
