At first, COVID-19 did not seem to discriminate. The patients who walked into Dr. Uché Blackstock’s urgent-care clinics in Brooklyn, N.Y., with coughs and fevers were white, black and brown.
But in the last few weeks, she has witnessed a notable shift: Fewer white people have showed up, while there has been a dramatic uptick in the number of black and brown patients.
Many are lower-income service workers and essential workers — delivery drivers, police officers, subway workers, corrections officers — who do not have the luxury of working from home or retreating to a second home in a less dense community.