Before 11th March of the year 2020 the definition of what we call normal and what we call privileges were completely different from what is today’s normal. Just to give you some examples if you don’t already know old normal was eating out, old privilege long weekends. New normal is week-long weekends new privilege eating out. It is as if our lives have turned upside down.

There were many pandemics in the past which claimed millions of life Black Death, Spanish Flu, etc. Now there is one more added to the list and is spreading faster than ever. All the media channels are overwhelmed by graphs in which the USA is leading this pandemic march with Brazil and India not far behind. More than 3 Million lives have fallen to date and many more to come.  Were all around we can see banners of “We are in this together” but I don’t think that is true all around.

This graph paints a very grim but inconvertible horror story of what is going on in the USA. Data provided by New York times and US Census suggest that as the pandemic goes on, percentage of people dying from COVID is all not same across all races.

This gif made from most recent data available (10/07/2020) corrobprate that COVID-19 is not evenly spread across all of the USA. It is not hard to observe, as we sort states based on racial communities, and as the percent in population increases white dominating communities start diverging from minorities. This triggers a question that" what is making this difference after all?"

The plots below give us a better insight and a direction to look in and try to spot where the problems could be. It comes up that a neighborhood that has more minorities(African American, Hispanic) has less population on average than a white neighborhood but the percentage of cases is more in black communities. That to as reported by New York Times: In the third Black mayor of Kansas City, Mo., which is in a state where 40 percent of those infected are Black or Latino even though those groups make up just 16 percent of the state’s population. Also, you can see in the graphs the living standards of white neighborhoods are very different from one occupied majorly by minorities. When saying living standard I mean Percentage of people living under poverty, Percent of the population uninsured. 

I would like to take your attention towards one of the most important parameters to measure here Social Vulnerability Index which is tracked by the Center for Disease Control in the USA. (The degree to which a community exhibits certain social conditions, including high poverty, a low percentage of vehicle access, or crowded households, may affect that community’s ability to prevent human suffering and financial loss in the event of a disaster. These factors describe a community’s social vulnerability.) was the definition provided by the CDC. The Variable used in this analysis provides an overall tract summary ranking variable. Looking at the SVI graph we can quickly draw this conclusion that a minority community is so much more vulnerable.

One other reason for this catastrophe hitting minorities harder is the kind of employment mionrities in USA have.

Caption for the picture.

Caption for the picture.

This graph taken from USA bureau of labor statistics shows that most of the African American and Hispanic community work in sectors like service, transportation, production, and material moving in which its hard to perform social distancing and people are more vulnerable to getting exposed to the virus.