Who is getting infected with COVID-19?
The distribution of confirmed COVID-19 cases reveals significant disparities within California’s overall racial and ethnic demographics, with Latino and Native Hawaiian / Pacific Islander groups having a disproportionate share of cases relative to their share of the population. Structural racism, poverty and the increased likelihood of having underlying conditions, such as heart disease and asthma, are likely to contribute to this disparity.
From the official State of California COVID-19 update web page (https://update.covid19.ca.gov/) on July 15, 2020
In Santa Clara County, California health authorities initially exempted construction projects where large numbers of workers labor closely together including luxury apartment complexes in densely populated neighborhoods. The vast majority of these construction workers in California are Latino and obviously do not have the option to “work from home.” After widespread outcry in Santa Clara County and the rest of the San Francisco Bay Area, these projects were stopped for a few weeks and then resumed in early May and continue unabated at present despite the fears of a “second wave.”
As with the Black Lives Matter protests and riots, the issue is primarily spreading the disease to vulnerable parents and grand-parents as construction workers tend to be younger and in good health.
(C) 2020 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.
About Me
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).