Johns Hopkins University Public Health Experts Lay Out a Challenging Game Plan in POLITICO to Reduce the Impact of COVID-19 on the Most Vulnerable Populations
By early April 2020, it was becoming clear to researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Equity that the global pandemic was having an outsized impact on communities of color in the US, and around the world. Dr. Lisa Cooper, the Center’s director and one of the world’s leading experts on health inequities, found herself answering lots of questions from the media and policy leaders seeking to understand why minority and other socio-economically disadvantaged groups were seeing infection and death rates out of proportion for their share of the population.
In a piece called “A Game Plan to Help the Most Vulnerable,” published in Politico on April 7, Dr. Cooper and Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein (Director of the Bloomberg American Health Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) team up to explain why “we’ll need to do a lot more than wear face masks and use Zoom to work from home” to stop the spread of COVID-19, especially among disadvantaged communities. In this article they lay out why helping the most needy in our society is good for everyone when it comes to controlling a viral pandemic.
Dr. Cooper and Dr. Sharfstein discuss some of the systemic social issues—for example, poverty, inadequate and crowded housing, lack of education--that increase the vulnerabilities of these groups, some of which are the legacies of decades of policies that pattern racist attitudes and discrimination into the social fabric. These policies have prevented minorities, the poor, and the homeless from accessing care, safe housing, and economic opportunities to improve their living situations. However, without addressing these underlying deficiencies, the doctors point out that conditions for the rapid spread of COVID-19 will continue to exist, and will hamper efforts to bring the pandemic under control.
The solutions to these problems are not simple, fast or inexpensive. Dr. Cooper and Dr. Sharfstein outline four basic areas that need to be addressed to improve not just health outcomes for these groups during the pandemic, but at all times. The measures the JHU scholars advocate to help the most disadvantaged groups include expanding access to housing, ensuring access to nutritious food, improving educational opportunities (in person and on-line), and promoting policies that provide health care and sick leave time to employees so they don’t have to continue working even when they are ill. These measures need to be pushed by local communities in a grassroots effort that will gradually transform American society to ensure that the most disadvantaged and vulnerable don’t always suffer the most in every social crisis.
The changes the doctors call for are big and system wide. They will take considerable effort to put into place, but they will benefit all members of society. Implementing them, however, is a challenge that must be met, for as Dr. Cooper and Dr Sharfstein write:
“The ties that bind the rich and poor, the powerful and the vulnerable, have been invisible. That is no longer true. We share the risk of viral infection. We share the health care system. We share the need to look out for one another. And when this global pandemic ends, our children and grandchildren will share the legacy we leave and the results of the choices we make today.”
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Read the entire Op-Ed here.