Vital Magazine

"However, when clinicians insert race into their tools, they risk interpreting racial disparities as immutable facts rather than as injustices that require intervention. Researchers and clinicians must distinguish between the use of race in descriptive statistics, where it plays a vital role in epidemiologic analyses, and in prescriptive clinical guidelines, where it can exacerbate inequities."

Hidden in Plain Sight — Reconsidering the Use of Race Correction in Clinical Algorithms | NEJM Medicine and Society from The New England Journal of Medicine — Hidden in Plain Sight — Reconsidering the Use of Race Correction in Clinical Algorithms

“Much is yet unknown about specific cytokines and their roles in disease. But the likelihood of disease in general is not so mysterious. Often, it’s a matter of what societies choose to tolerate. America has empty hotels while people sleep in parking lots. We are destroying food while people go hungry. We are allowing individuals to endure the physiological stresses of financial catastrophe while bailing out corporations. With the coronavirus, we do not have vulnerable populations so much as we have vulnerabilities as a population. Our immune system is not strong.”

Why Some People Get Sicker Than Others COVID-19 is proving to be a disease of the immune system. This could, in theory, be controlled.

“The way we talk about disease can actually alter how diseases spread. As medical humanities scholar Heather Schell has said, the practice of epidemiology links statistical analysis and pattern formation with the creation of narratives about the impact disease may have on the world.”

The way we talk about coronavirus matters Kari Nixon, a scholar of medical humanities, explains why it's crucial to remember that coronavirus, like all diseases, is about people. She looks back at what the histories of syphilis, HIV and polio can teach us about coronavirus and the impact of 'outbreak narratives.'