With COVID’s racial disparities it's not just underlying conditions, its social factors

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Millett, now vice president of the Foundation for AIDS Research, authored one of the earliest studies on the matter, finding that “employment status, lack of access to health insurance and overcrowded homes were better predictors of COVID-19 than any underlying factor.”

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When looking at COVID’s racial disparities, co-morbidities are a factor, but not the be-all, end-all once proposed, said New Orleans native Dr. Akilah Jefferson Shah

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Thomas LaVeist, dean of the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, has a similar take. LaVeist sees underlying conditions as a possible contributing factor in the virus’s disparate toll, “but not the main driver.”

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So what else explains it? At the top of the list, experts say, are social factors.

“Where we’re born, we live, we work and we die is much more important than co-morbidities,” said Jefferson Shah.

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A growing number of researchers have found that co-morbidities are impossible to separate from a larger universe of risk factors including poverty, dense household occupancy, residential segregation, essential-worker employment and lack of insurance.

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“Those are the issues that we should be focusing upon,” Millett said. “Those are the issues that magnify risk for COVID transmission, hospitalizations and deaths, beyond the contributions of underlying health conditions.”

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