Communities of color are being hammered by coronavirus, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t seem very interested in knowing how bad the situation is—or telling Congress about it, anyway. On the day of a congressional deadline for reporting data on race and COVID-19, the CDC sent Congress 2.5 pages: one page of introductory material summarizing the questions Congress had asked and CDC’s approach, one page of links to public CDC webpages with relevant information, and half a page of conclusion indicating that perhaps at some point the agency will get better data.
The Department of Health and Human Services “should be embarrassed by the lazy, incomplete, 2.5-page copy-and-paste job it calls a ‘report’ on the racial disparities of COVID-19 cases,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted in response. “I'm going to keep fighting until we get this monthly demographic data as required by law.”
“This wholly inadequate response tells us nothing except what we already knew: the Trump Administration would prefer to ignore the disproportionate impact this crisis is having on communities of color,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington said in a statement.
According to the limited CDC data available, Black people make up nearly 23% of coronavirus deaths nationally. Black people are about 13% of the U.S. population. And state after state has provided at least partial data showing giant racial disparities. In the Washington, D.C., area, Latinos are about 10% of the population and about a third of COVID-19 cases. In Iowa, they’re 6% of the population and about 20% of COVID-19 cases. In Washington state, it’s 13% and 31%. According to a recent poll, 30% of Black adults and 26% of Latino adults say they know someone who’s died as a result of the virus. For white adults, the number is just 10%.
It’s in that context that the CDC’s cavalier response to Congress is particularly appalling. The agency is supposed to provide Congress another report within 30 days, and Democrats plan to keep pushing, hard, for more complete information. “We will use every tool at our disposal to uncover why this administration waited so long to take any action and make clear the grave consequences of their inaction,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts told reporters on a Wednesday. “And while oversight is critical, we must also keep up the pressure on this administration to take action now before we are robbed, unnecessarily, of even more lives.”