A funeral director wearing full PPE looks at the American flag on the casket of a 90-year-old Korean War veteran who died of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in a nursing home, in Denver, Colorado, April 23, 2020.
Rick Wilking/Reuters
In a new Insider poll, 18% of Americans said they knew someone who was hospitalized from the coronavirus, and 16% knew someone who died from it.
The racial breakdown of those numbers are stark: While 14% of white respondents said they knew someone who died from the disease, 26% of Black respondents did.
The pandemic has disproportionately affected Black Americans, from those who have gotten sick to those who have lost their jobs in the economic downturn.
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One in four Black Americans said they knew someone who died of the coronavirus, compared to 14% of white Americans, according to a new Insider poll.
Around 16% of all respondents said they knew someone who died from COVID-19.
The poll of 1,111 Americans highlighted racial disparities during the coronavirus pandemic. While the percentage of white and Black Americans who knew someone who was diagnosed with coronavirus was roughly the same, at 35% and 38% respectively, the disparity became apparent when it came to the percentage of people who knew someone who was hospitalized.
About 16% of white respondents said they knew someone who was hospitalized for coronavirus, compared to 27% of Black respondents.
The poll with SurveyMonkey was collected June 8-9, after many states lifted their coronavirus lockdowns.
Black Americans have been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus, Business Insider previously reported.
A report by researchers at amfAR, a non-profit focused on AIDS research, found that US counties in “which at least 13% of the population is Black account for 58% of COVID-19 deaths and 52% of cases nationwide,” Business Insider previously reported.
In Georgia, where about a third of the population is Black, African-American patients accounted for 83% of coronavirus cases that required hospitalization.
As Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said in May, “Crisis can exacerbate existing inequalities.”
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African Americans have higher rates of underlying health conditions like diabetes and hypertension that could put them at a higher risk for developing complications from the novel coronavirus.
Black Americans also disproportionately hold jobs deemed essential during the pandemic. While Black Americans make up 12% of the overall workforce, they account for 17% of frontline employees, according to a study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
And Black people are uninsured at nearly twice the rate of whites, according to US Census data.
Many inequalities in American society account for the coronavirus pandemic hitting Black Americans harder than white people, and the numbers merely begin to highlight reality.
SurveyMonkey Audience polls from a national sample balanced by census data of age and gender. Respondents are incentivized to complete surveys through charitable contributions. Generally speaking, digital polling tends to skew toward people with access to the internet. SurveyMonkey Audience doesn’t try to weigh its sample based on race or income. A total of 1,111 respondents were collected June 8-9, 2020, with a margin of error plus or minus 3 percentage points and a 95% confidence level.
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