Update (August 5, 2020): The paper is now available on Early View and will soon be open access, along with the rest of the special issue.
The American Journal of Human Biology has just accepted a new paper of mine for a forthcoming special issue on COVID-19. Here’s the title and abstract — more to come once the final version is out.
Systemic Racism, Chronic Health Inequities, and COVID-19: A Syndemic in the Making?
Clarence C. Gravlee
Racial inequities in the impact of COVID-19 present an important test case for syndemic theory. Syndemic theory holds that large-scale, political-economic inequities result in clustered epidemics that interact with each other and with noxious social conditions, resulting in a higher burden of disease and death than would be expected under models that treat a given epidemic in isolation. Emerging evidence suggests that relationships among systemic racism, cardiometabolic diseases (especially hypertension and diabetes), and COVID-19 may constitute a syndemic in the making. I propose a tentative syndemic model of COVID-19 to account for staggering racial inequities in the pandemic in the United States, where age-adjusted death rates among Black people are as much as nine times higher as for other racialized groups. The model seeks to address conceptual and methodological challenges in existing work that leave the central tenets of syndemic theory largely untested. The scale of COVID-19 inequities underscores the urgency of testing the model and adapting public health and policy responses to potential synergistic effects with long-standing racial health inequities.