Mapping Los Angeles’ Unequal COVID-19 Surge

Representative image.

It’s been slightly more than a year since what we used to call the novel coronavirus was first detected in California.

Not long after those first cases were found, experts began warning about how it would disproportionately hurt poorer people, whose jobs were likely to be deemed essential, and who were likely to be members of communities of color.

But what’s been less discussed is the role of deeply rooted inequality — long magnified in California — in driving the rampant spread of the virus.

Over the weekend, my colleagues on The New York Times’ graphics desk and I published a piece looking at how that has played out in Los Angeles County, the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Also Read: One year since India reported 1st COVID-19 case: A timeline of the outbreak

While it’s perhaps unsurprising at this point that lower-income, predominantly Latino neighborhoods have been hit harder by the virus than richer, whiter communities, the interactive map shows in stark relief the differences.

It also illustrates clearly how Los Angeles is defined by “profound inequities that overlap with geography,” as Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, put it in a tweet.

There has been much focus on how much individuals are adhering to public health directives, but as we reported, for the essential workers who can’t shelter, and who can’t afford enough space to isolate if they or their loved ones get sick, even following guidelines to the letter isn’t protection if the virus is everywhere in their neighborhood.

“What we’re seeing, still, is that a lot of families don’t have any other choice but to continue business as usual,” said Laura Hidalgo, the leader of a COVID-19 outreach team for Meet Each Need With Dignity, a nonprofit group based in Pacoima.

In Pacoima — a predominantly Latino neighborhood in San Fernando Valley where much of our story is set — 1 in 5 residents has been infected with COVID-19, compared with 1 in 24 residents of much whiter Santa Monica. Pacoima’s median household income is about $56,000, compared with $97,000 in Santa Monica.

If you explore the map, other similar contrasts show up: In El Sereno, a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood with a median household income of about $57,000, 1 in 7 residents have been infected. In neighboring South Pasadena, a small city of tree-lined streets that often shows up in movies as an idyllic American suburb, 1 in 22 residents have been infected. The median household income is roughly $106,000.

Also Read: Explained | Why India has relatively lesser number of COVID-19 cases

Daniel Flaming, president of the nonprofit Economic Roundtable, told me that “income polarization” within Los Angeles County, coupled with the fact that a large number of the region’s lower-paid workers are in service industries where they must interact with customers, has made the surge in the county, the nation’s most populous, particularly intense.

But if you zoom in or out, the patterns, the inequities, repeat.

As one reader pointed out on Twitter, the city of Long Beach also has lower case rates in its wealthier, whiter east-side ZIP codes, according to the city’s health and human services department website. (Overall, 1 in 10 Long Beach residents has gotten COVID-19.)

And on a larger scale, researchers for the Community and Labor Center at the University of California, Merced, wrote in a July policy brief that California’s summer surge was hammering counties with high concentrations of low-wage workers, including in the Central Valley, where relatively high case rates have persisted throughout the pandemic.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration and state lawmakers have scrambled to blunt the effects of the pandemic, imposing dozens of rules for employers; starting programs to give essential workers, like in health care or agriculture, access to free hotel rooms to isolate; and introducing other initiatives aimed at getting aid to the most vulnerable.

Most recently, legislators passed a bill allocating billions in federal pandemic aid to help tenants pay back rent and extending what many advocates have said are desperately needed eviction protections.

But many of those regulations haven’t been sufficiently enforced, said Edward Flores, an associate professor at UC Merced, who was the lead author of the policy brief. And some of the state’s most vulnerable essential workers, those who are in the country illegally, largely haven’t had access to aid.

It’s all worth considering as the state moves through its latest attempt at reopening, including in Los Angeles, where over the weekend, restaurants and a host of other businesses were able to reopen outdoors or with restrictions.

Because, as experts have said time and again, when one part of the community is being hit hard, it puts everyone at risk.

(Author: Jill Cowan )/(c.2021 The New York Times Company)