Dr. Fauci on why the coronavirus is wreaking havoc on Black communities - CBS News

Marc Lamont Hill: The African American community has been hit particularly hard by the coronavirus.

Fauci: It's what I call a double whammy against the minority, but particularly the African American and Latinx community.

You don't like to generalize, but as a demographic group, the African American community is more likely to be in a job that does not allow them to stay at home and do teleworking most of the time, they're in essential jobs.

The other side of the coin — and this has a lot to do with long-term social determinants of health — as a demographic group, African Americans have disproportionately greater incidents of the underlying conditions that allow you to have a more unfavorable outcome, namely more serious disease, hospitalization and even death.

If you look at populations as a whole, and you look at the demographic group of African Americans and the demographic group of the rest of the population, or Caucasian, what you see is a much greater incidence.

So you have two things going against you: You are physically in a position that's more likely you're going to get infected, and if you do get infected, you're more likely to have a serious outcome.

How do we get the most vulnerable people, particularly poor Black people, access to health care, access to preventative stuff.

First of all, a great awareness of the need that if you're African American and you get infected, it is more likely you're going to have a serious outcome?

The longer-term one is something that you're not going to cure overnight, and that is the economic and other conditions that African Americans find themselves in that they're not in a situation where they get a greater access to health care from a more of an economic standpoint.

So when people think about this outbreak, they say, "Hey, let's pay attention to this because it's another example." I went through the same thing early on in the early years of HIV, the disproportionate number of African Americans who get HIV infection?

There's a long history of skepticism of the American medical establishment in the Black community.

When I started the HIV program at the [National Institutes of Health], we developed relationships with community reps who were trusted by the African American community because they were reflecting the African American community.

So I often joke, but it's the truth, you want to go into the African American community with people who look and think and act like the people you're trying to convince.

You get a White guy like me with a suit like me and a tie on going in, talking to people who are people that you don't usually relate to every day.

So, when you see people in authority and people at the community level saying the same thing, hopefully, you can get the African American community to essentially do things for their own benefit because it's for your own benefit to protect yourself from this infection