Coronavirus deaths three times more likely in LA’s poor neighbourhoods

Poverty intersects with racial inequality as region reports nearly 1,000 deaths

Los Angeles residents living in poverty are dying at three times the rate of wealthier citizens, the county’s public health department has said.

In a press release announcing 18 new deaths from Covid-19, authorities said places where between 30 and 100 per cent of residents were poor had a death rate from Covid-19 infection of 16.5 per 100,000. In areas where fewer than one-tenth were poor, the death rate was 5.3 per 100,000.

Combined with Long Beach and Pasadena, LA has now confirmed close to 1,000 deaths from Covid-19, making it one of the worst-affected cities in the US. In his recent State of the City address, mayor Eric Garcetti drew attention to the virus’s disproportionate impact on those at the sharp end of inequality, and questioned whether “normality” is what Angelenos should be hoping to return to.

The Public Policy Institute of California reported that in 2017, around four in 10 Californians were living in or near poverty, most of them in families with at least one working adult – and that Los Angeles county had the highest poverty rate in the state, at 23 per cent.

As goes for much of the rest of the US elsewhere, poverty in LA intersects with other forms of inequality, particularly racial. Of all the city’s racial groups, Latinos were the hardest-hit, with more than 23 per cent living in poverty in 2017, more than double the rate among whites.

Read more

The city’s ongoing homelessness crisis, meanwhile, is among the worst in the country. Mr Garcetti made this one of the key points in his speech.

“To have 36,000 people without a place to call home – that was a public health crisis well before Covid-19 came along. I called for a FEMA-level response to our homelessness crisis almost two years ago, and it took this virus to finally get the federal funding to begin to make it happen.”

The city has taken measures to prevent more people losing their homes during the outbreak, including some protections for renters who may find themselves unable to pay their landlords while furloughed or unable to leave their homes and work.

Other major cities are also facing up to the coronavirus outbreak’s devastating implications for poor Americans.

Chicago has lately seen its poverty rate decline over the last several years, but it is still home to thousands of poor people, including families and who struggle to get the food they need outside school.

Many vital in-person services have been forced by coronavirus to close their doors – and young people of colour are particularly hard-hit.