3 - Black People and COVID-19

Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused physical and psycho-mental torture around the world for the last few years. Africa, unlike other continents that witnessed devastating consequences resulting in thousands and millions of deaths, went rather unscathed, disproving all medical prognoses for a tsunami of death toll that was waiting to cripple the continent because of its lack of advanced health facilities. The death toll that Africa suffered in the grueling hands of COVID-19 was minimal compared to the United States, Asia, and Europe (Maeda & Nkengasong, 2021., Anjorin, Abioye, Asowata, Soipe, Kazeem, Adesanya, & Omotayo, 2021). There have been speculations as to why Black people in Africa were spared. But the truth is that most of the traditional healing methods, coupled with warm weather on the continent, boosted the chances of people from getting infected. But the effect this disease had on the other Black people in the Diaspora was devastating (Reyes, 2020).

The Black person finds herself or himself in a quandary, unable to make sense of what COVID-19 is all about and unable to influence decisions taken by Western-advanced countries. This was demonstrated in the number vaccine hesitancy both in Africa and among Blacks in the Daispora (Khubchandani & Macias 2021., Afolabi & Ilesanmi 2021). The Black ancestry looks on waiting to abide by those decisions by its former slave and colonial masters. The Black person is helpless. In China, where the virus “supposedly” originated, Black people were being brutalized and left homeless and told to return to Africa because it appeared to the Chinese that Africans in their country had imported the virus to China (Xu, Sun, Cao, Fan, Pan, Yao, & Li 2021). In the United States of America, the proportion of Black people that have died from counteracting the virus has doubled when compared to that of the White population because they suffer from underline health problems like diabetes, heart disease, lung cancers, and are heavily deficient in vitamin D that helps with building one's immune systems (Cyrus, Clarke, Hadley, Bursac, Trepka, Devieux & Wagner 2020). Since they are the frontline workers because they cannot afford to stay at home and be paid like white-collar job income earners, they have become targets because they are essential workers providing for the rest of America.