In Powering Up, we explore the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 in African American communities
Marianne Udow-Phillips, founding executive director of the Center for Health and Research Transformation, joined Anne Doyle for this week’s Powering Up! podcast, “African Americans Bearing the Brunt of U.S. COVID-19 Pandemic.”
Detroit, Michigan, one of the COVID-19 hot spots in the U.S., is bearing witness to the disproportionate impact the pandemic is having on African American communities. To date, 35 percent of the virus victims in Michigan are African Americans, although they make up only 15 percent of the state’s population. The same is true in other U.S. states with significant African American populations.
Podcast guests Marianne Udow-Phillips, former director of the Michigan Department of Human Services, and Vernice Davis Antony, former public health officer for Detroit, both saw this coming, writes Powering Up, because they each have decades of expertise in the devastating toll of generational poverty and the weaknesses in the U.S. health care system.