Socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic
COVID-19 did not affect everyone in each country the same way.  As of May 2020, APM Research Lab said the death rate among black Americans was 2.4 times as high as for whites and 2.2 times as high as for Latino and Asian Americans. In July 2020, The New York Times printed data from the Centers for Disease Control showing that black and Latino Americans were three times as likely to become sick and twice as likely to die as white Americans.  This showed some difference from place to place, but it was mostly true in both cities and the country, regardless of how old people were.  Native Americans were also more likely than whites to become sick and die.  Asian Americans were 1.3 times as likely to become sick as whites were. Camara Jones, an epidemiologist who once worked for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said this was socioeconomic and not because of any natural difference in black and white people's bodies.  In the United States, black citizens are more likely to work jobs where they serve the public and to ride on buses and trains rather than take their own cars to work, which makes them more likely to be infected than people who work in private offices or from home. Sharrelle Barber, an epidemiologist and biostatistician from Drexel University, also said black Americans can live in crowded neighborhoods where social distancing is harder to do and healthy food harder to find.  Both Barber and Jones blamed the long history of racism in the United States for these things. Three senators, Kamala Harris,  Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren, said the federal government should start recording the race of COVID-19 patients so scientists could study this problem.