The early months of the pandemic exposed vulnerabilities among multiple races and ethnicities in California, perhaps none more profoundly than the state’s Black residents. The first wave of COVID killed Black people at disproportionately high rates, with a combination of working and living conditions, existing health problems and inadequate testing in their communities likely leading to spread of the disease.
The bigger story was far deeper and longstanding. As then-California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris put it at the time, “Because of the true and unfortunate history of medical maltreatment of different groups of people, but especially African Americans in the United States, there are real issues of trust between the African American community and the health care system.”
