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Los Angeles and COVID
The Deadly Math of Political Correctness
California is drowning in COVIID. The mitigation plan of the State lurches on, blown away by the stats in this eighth month of a two-week shutdown, with no relief in sight for its beleaguered hospitals, citizens, or small businesses. Even Governor Newsom’s new order on December 6 to ban outdoor dining, without consulting anyone in the restaurant industry, or for that matter, any scientists or physicians, has not helped a bit.
We know who is vulnerable and how to protect them by now, so why does the state persist in blanket lockdowns, especially when this method has failed to kill the virus but has succeeded in killing the livelihood of so many people?
The answer, I believe, lies in one pillar of the governing philosophy of this left-leaning state: identity politics. Scrolling down on California’s own COVID Dashboard, the graph on infections by ethnicity provides a stunning visual on the disparities in infection and death among ethnicities. Even a non-scientist can understand what this means. Latinos are tragically suffering infection, hospitalization, and death in disproportionate numbers, even as more restrictive lockdowns are imposed.
Latinos account for 58.1% of cases, with only 38.9% of the population. Whites, on the other hand, account for 19.2% of cases at 36.6% of the population. This means, roughly speaking, that three times the number of Latinos versus Whites become infected or die.
What the governor is doing to remedy this disparity is unknown; he has imposed collective punishment, however, banning entire occupations, closing schools, and issuing ever more byzantine regulations for the lucky businesses still open – all to no avail. Newsom’s Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly weakly asserted that no science suggests this latest ban would be effective, but it might keep people at home. We have heard the usual from activists about systemic racism and historical inequities but little about how to help those particular sick people now. Of course, no one mentions lifestyle.
In contrast to the state’s official silence on addressing the lifestyle issue, the adjacent county, the more conservative Orange County, has allied its Public Health Department with Latino health advocates and hospitals, is distributing DIY tests for home use in its Latino cities, along with outreach, education, and treatment; and their Latino rate is ten points below the state’s. Targeting can work. It’s a start, and worthy of emulation. To this day, Los Angeles County, with three times the population of Orange County has between five and six times the number of deaths.
Media are beginning to notice. Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, who rose to fame with his serio-comic column, “Ask a Mexican,” has a differing view from the state. He calls out his Hispanic friends and neighbors for a culture of denial and indifference to COVID, for their everyday banda parties and bounce houses and Lakers celebrations. Even the comments bolster his observations.
The California Dashboard, however, does not call for any behavior modifications for this heavily impacted population. On the contrary, the dashboard warns us that “associating the disease with any particular group of people or ethnicity is wrong.” This is wrongheaded and deadly. The state does provide information on monetary benefits, rental rights, and medical treatment, but ignores discussion of prevention. The statewide lockdown we are all subject to, except for the ruling class and its favorites, does not seem to help the Latino infection rate, nor does it help now jobless low-income immigrant workers.
Why isn’t the state leading its own education and, yes, tough love measures? Surely there is some happy medium between arresting violators and ignoring massive gatherings. Why does the state leave it up to thoughtful journalists and the brave few Angelenos who call out their friends and family? In the face of this silence, only Latinos themselves – sadly, many from their hospital beds – warn others to take it seriously.
Perhaps this is why the elites are not talking about targeting the vulnerable. Their maskless outings to fancy dinner parties indicate they know what we know: that if you educate yourself and your family and friends and workplace and you follow the guidance on hygiene, you have a good chance to escape infection. But in California today, a paternalistic governor upholds the “marque dos” separatism of the politically correct left; that this very separatism has visited profound negative health effects on this population seems not to matter. The collective lockdown has not slowed the virus in the Latino community one bit, and now it is destroying the entry-level jobs that many Latinos start with on the way to their own American dream.
I hope that soon an enterprising reporter asks Newsom why he ignores this issue, before it’s too late. One small sliver of hope is that L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn has pushed the public health authorities to request the Mercy Ship and medical personnel that the county did not use in the last surge. A moderate Democrat, Hahn can still work with still President Trump, if the public health folks cannot. She realizes that if that Faucian dark winter does descend upon us, it will ravage not only Latino neighborhoods but everyone’s.
Published in Healthcare
I’d like to see some data relating positive case rate with people living in multi-generation households. It would also be nice to see things broken down by zip code, since the counties in CA are so big.
Thanks for this great post. You have pointed out the elephant in the room. I have no theory on why California’s response is so incompetent, but I suspect that political correctness plays some part.
This is what happens when you cry wolf for 7 months when the wolf is not around. When the wolf does arrive a people need to get eaten before the believe in the wolf.
I have read that latinos make up 72% of hospitalized cases. There is also the possibility that those who develop early symptoms are avoiding care as they risk losing a job,
We were in OC for Christmas and to see grandchildren we had not seen in a year. We took our HCQ but the only one wearing a mask was my daughter’s husband who is 40 and very afraid. They came for Christmas Day but he stayed outside and did not eat anything. His politics may be assumed. They live in Santa Monica.
When this thing first broke, I prescribed HCQ for all my kids, especially my younger son who is a fireman/paramedic and has type I diabetes. He has not been exposed to a sick case as he is now an engineer and less exposed to sick people.
In looking at California politics, extreme cynicism is a useful heuristic.
If you want extreme income disparity, the death of the middle class, cheap labor for the elites, the massive expansion of welfare rolls, and a client electorate that will reliably ensure that the Left’s one party rule for the benefit of the elites has no foreseeable end , there are some laws you just don’t enforce. Victor Davis Hanson has been writing about this for a long time.
The fact that some of those laws, such as the maximum density allowed for a given square footage of living space may have originated in part as a measure to slow the spread of contagious respiratory illnesses can be ignored. Omelette. Eggs.
They must do SOMETHING!
The official data, particularly in my State of California, is utterly full of crap.
My daughter has a childhood friend whose father is a senior VP at one of the networks. Often around Christmas time our families get together. This year we were talking and he was saying that his network tests around 20,000 people in their employ a week. Of those 20,000, around 40 on average will test positive for COVID. Of those 40 testing positive , 37 on average will be false positives. So in reality on average out of 20,000 people being tested for COVID each week, only 3 will actually have the disease. Only 3. Out of 20,000.
You can believe the official narrative all you want, but remember the diagnosis for flu right now is almost non- existent. Wonder why that could be ? I would also tend to believe a network’s private testing data for COVID far more than our official data, in a state where most of the officials are not only Democrat, but stridently crazy Democrat.
The false positives are rife. Private businesses I know of always send their positives back for more testing, and most of them are negative.
Do you also take the zinc and Amoxy? I am thinking of asking the doctor for that regimen.
I live in California. The response to everything is: incompetence. Fire? Incompetence. Energy policy? Incompetence. Welfare, taxes, immigration, healthcare, basic economics: incompetence.
They are highly competent at what’s important to them: achieving an increasingly neo-Marxist supermajority in both houses of the state legislature, and installing radical prosecutors at the city and county level.
That is pasted on top of good old political corruption; so long as something is favored by the Woke theocrats, it’s permissible.
The bullet train boondoggle is a good example. A wealthy family of real estate developers is on the state commission promoting the train. They want to build out upscale housing near the stations to take the commuters to bigger cities to work, and in between there will be housing for the peasants needed to maintain the lifestyle of their betters.
But it’s all good; the train is For The Environment.
I have a good friend who is a nurse at the Kaiser in Baldwin Park. They are being slammed.
I live in the nearby San Gabriel valley – last week when my grand daughter had to get a few stitches, the hospital we went to in Arcadia was a ghost town
Based upon my own covid experience in October, here is what I think is going on. I eventually tested negative, but while sick absented myself from everyone by moving into our front house. My friend’s husband tested positive while symptom free, he was also able to remove himself from everyone in his home.
I took my boss to the hospital where my friend works. He was very very ill. He was admitted to the ER, pumped full of fluids and released. Refused any therapeutics.
If that is how they are typically handling their patients (according to my friend, that is accurate) it’s no wonder the numbers are surging. Sick people are being sent home to be cared for by family members in multi-generational, more crowded households.
I have seen studies that report that 70-80% of COVID-19 transmission is at home. People (a) who live in higher density home and neighborhoods; (b) whose jobs cannot be performed using Zoom and (c) who do not have access to fresh replacement N95 masks, hand sanitizers, controlled environments and whose activities are more physical are gonna bring COVID home more often than others. Exciting new permutations of lockdowns, mask mandates etc will not have much effect on that reality.
I have not done any deep dives into ethnic data but I suspect that the apparent race differences are likely more linked to income and health conditions related to income. This is national data from the CDC:
Here in Maryland the overall death rate among reported cases is about 2% but 3% for white and 1.1% for Hispanics. I attribute that to the fact that the age of the hispanic population is significantly lower so more younger hispanic people are getting infected.
Small businesses and religious sites are Republican-intensive entities that can be targeted both as an ideological beatdown and as scapegoats for an utterly failed policy. There is no political of epidemiological advantage to applying a Newsome-style beatdown to the Hispanic community which even the perverted “science” of California’s official “experts” must understand.
I was not implying there should be a beatdown. I was saying that LA should emulate OC more instead of ignoring the situation.
I would never accuse anyone as demonstrably sane as you are of calling for more NewsomeThink. I would, however, theorize that once you adjust for income, lifestyle and occupational difference, the policy approach of OC, like everything else done to fight the spread, will have made a rather small difference if any.
Despite the breezy assurances of many medical experts, we do not have a complete handle on the transmission or higher contagiousness of COVID-19. We needed a strategy of learning to live with this new risk while doubling down on protecting the smaller, easily identifiable portion of the population truly at risk.
No, but I have been taking vitamin D for years. If I got sick I would take them. My wife had all the symptoms of Covid in June. She had 5 negative tests. She was hospitalized three days. She has taken HCQ for her rheumatoid arthritis for years.
So your boss refused therapeutics or the ER refused to administer them?
I agree that we must treat people quicker; why wait till they can’t breathe? There must be a regimen that can be used outpatient.
Latinos — is that a polite word for illegals?
No, not really. Remember, we had am amnesty less than a generation ago.
Sorry. I wasn’t clear. After being pumped full of fluids in the ER, he was told he was being released. He asked for therapeutics and was told he could only be prescribed medicine if he was being admitted to the hospital. And he was told in no uncertain terms that he was Not being admitted to the hospital.
The nurse I spoke of who works in Baldwin Park is a Latino, born in Pacoima. We certainly have our share of Illegals but we also have generations of Latinos who have been in California a lot longer than my family.
My closest friend in medical school 50 years ago was a son of Mexican parents. His mother made her own tortillas. She did not speak English. He was one of 10 kids, one of whom had died in an industrial accident. The other 8 all had graduate degrees. Ed went to Stanford and USC medical school on scholarships fund by Francisco Bravo, a Mexican-America physician in east LA. His wife was the daughter of an east coast accounting partner who never approved of Ed. They met at Stanford. We met her parents many times and it was embarrassing. WASPs. Ed is/was a great guy and had a very successful career in Surgery in San Diego. His scholarship specified that, if he practiced in a community that had 25% Spanish surnames, he did not have to pay it back. His daughter joined him in practice and is probably still there.
Ed was too sick with diabetes to attend our 50th class reunion in 2016 and may have succumbed. Black Lives Matter should study Francisco Bravo. His LA Times obit is behind a pay wall but he founded a clinic in east LA that lasted 50 years.
https://www.bizapedia.com/ca/the-bravo-medical-clinic-inc.html
The Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet high school trains kids to work in medical related fields.
That’s a wonderful American story.
Adam Carolla has been banging this Newsom drum for the last year, particularly around COVID, and how the restrictions make absolutely no sense. The inconsistency and outright insanity of even prohibiting outside dining is flatly stupid on its face.
Latinos, who often live in crowded, multigenerational households and work in retail, health care, construction and other essential jobs, have been hit hard. The city’s map of Covid cases per 100,000 residents by neighborhood tells the story: Richer neighborhoods have lower caseloads, poorer ones, with more people packed in each household, have higher ones. Our West L.A. neighborhood falls in the middle.
Assuming cause and effect, that an open restaurant is causing the transmission, while ignoring the fact that families living in close proximity to one another, and essentially can’t avoid contact unless their home is big enough to permanently distance in, means its incompetence and political considerations driving the bus in California.
Which seems about par for the course.
Ed’s father had his own wrought iron business in east LA. Another small businessman.
I don’t understand this. Aren’t Hispanics subject to the same lockdown as non-Hispanics? Are they flouting them? Are authorities not enforcing the lockdown?
But if you are the ones who still have to go do the things that can’t be done over Zoom and then return to high-density living, lockdowns have a rather marginal benefit no matter how fiercely enforced.
The general consensus is that people are sharing the virus between themselves at home or at gatherings. Also, the hospitals that are slammed are in poorer areas; it’s not a leap to assume that people in those areas don’t have the benefit of working at home. Nor is 600 bucks going keep the family fed.
So, more crowded, multi-generational homes. With members of the household that are leaving daily to work, then returning.
So, no, they’re not “flouting” lockdowns. Instead they’re working for Amazon or Postmates and serving the people who are making their full salary and not leaving their homes.
There is sporadic enforcement everywhere. Outdoor dining is still allowed in my little burb, and if you read Arellano’s column, he says that big dance parties and BBQs break up when the police go by and then resume. Everybody does that, depending on the city.
Yes, i have noted that the left are good at getting elected; Obama, for instance, was a ruthless Chicago pol who won every race he entered. Governance? Not so much. Trump, for all his faults, has an amazing record of actual accomplishments.