Introduction to Psychology
Questions of Bias in Covid-19 Treatment Add to The Mourning for Black Families
Racial biasness and discrimination are on a significant increase in many social set-ups. This is encouraged by the global interactions originating from the free movement of individuals with various diversities. Treatment of worlds pandemic disease, Covid-19, is not an exception to the racial biasness. This critique paper, therefore, focusses on assessing and analyzing, “Questions of Bias in Covid-19 Treatment Add to The Mourning for Black Families”, an article published by John and Audra Burch for the New York Times.
The article is based on the possible biased treatment of Reginald Relf, a 50 years old black-American covid-19 patient who finally succumbs to death as a result of biased treatment by a clinic in Chicago and other patients with almost similar cases. Mr Relf is sent home for a home-based quarantine without a covid-19 virus test besides the patient showing clear symptoms for covid-19 virus and background history for Diabetes. This mode of treatment is perceived to exhibit racial biasness by the diseased sister. She makes this conclusion through a question which suggests that White-Americans are subjected to proper healthcare treatment, unlike the black-Americans.
Previously conducted research reveals that African-American patients are subjected to unsatisfactory medical services as compared to white patients. This poses a significant health danger with the global covid-19 pandemic which is associated with many sicknesses than fatalities (Laurencin & McClinton, 2020). Nevertheless, death rates highly depend on the nature of care given to patients. Additionally, most of the African-American patients are exposed to additional pain originating from the race witnessing an alleged more fatality figure than the whites. This contributes to a possibility of racial biasness in the healthcare systems which had also been warned by the centres for the disease control and prevention.
Healthcare systems possess a positive history of implicit racial biasness and discrimination during the provision of health services (Chapman, Kaatz & Carnes, 2013). Many black Americans seeking medical assistance have been in many reported cases handled in a manner suggesting that they are only interested in the medical drugs for other purposes which are different from treatment. As a result, the patients are never diagnosed or treated but sent away due to perceived judgement that is based on racial orientation (Hall et al, 2015). With the emergence of the covid-19 pandemic, there exist significant fear within many families, psychological researchers and health care practitioners in relation to the roles played by racial biasness and discrimination towards the uneven distribution of fatalities among the white and black races in America.
Nevertheless, many concluded researches relating to the topic of study have confirmed the existing disparity in the distribution of covid-19 special health facilities with African-American communities getting disadvantaged. This has contributed to the racial bias in the treatment and testing of the covid-19 virus with the whites being allocated more privileges in handling the pandemic within the over-stretched health system. Additionally, according to Farley et al (2020) away from the unequal distribution of health resources, the racial bias in covid-19 treatment similarly pose a great danger to the entire population with a possibility of the neglected African-American populations infecting the white population thereby generally increasing the impacts of the virus.
This research article holds water as it focuses on finding possible reasons behind more covid-19 related deaths among the African-American races than those witnessed among the white populations besides existing pre-cautionary warning by the centre of disease control and prevention to the healthcare practitioners against allowing racism find roots in their services during this period of the covid-19 pandemic. On the contrary, many doctors and other health practitioners have been treating all patients equally regardless of their races. However, according to Johnson et al. (2004), these practitioners are operating in a system that is racially viewed which leads to their racial commitments and achievement getting discredited or outplayed.
As commonly known, several of covid-19 related deaths originate from underlying diseases thus demanding for better handling of the patients and the underlying diseases. In contrary, this article possessed a limited focus on the racial distribution and roles played by these diseases in the witnessed number of deaths. Moreover, this should not form a defensive reason for subjecting African-American communities to weaker and less effective drugs which ought to be reducing pain and reducing symptoms for the underlying diseases as noted by some researchers.
In conclusion, humanity and equal treatment of people is a joint responsibility that should be embraced by everybody from all diversities of life. The racial treatment of the African American as a minority race during the treatment of covid-19 virus provides no solution to the pandemic but it instead poses more danger to the entire federal population at large. With selective and racial handling of the virus patients, the number of re-infections and spread of the virus to citizens of all races shall massively increase thereby further exposing the economy to adverse negative effects. Moreover, racial bias in healthcare systems during this period of a pandemic shall eventually lead to an extensive racial division among the black Americans and the whites thus destroying the already made development against the social malpractice.
References
Chapman, E. N., Kaatz, A., & Carnes, M. (2013). Physicians and implicit bias: how doctors may unwittingly perpetuate health care disparities. Journal of general internal medicine, 28(11), 1504-1510.
Farley, J. H., Hines, J. F., Lee, N. K., Brooks, S. E., Nair, N., & Chapman-Davis, E. Promoting Health Equity in the COVID-19 Era.
Hall, W. J., Chapman, M. V., Lee, K. M., Merino, Y. M., Thomas, T. W., Payne, B. K., … & Coyne-Beasley, T. (2015). Implicit racial/ethnic bias among health care professionals and its influence on health care outcomes: a systematic review. American journal of public health, 105(12), e60-e76.
Johnson, R. L., Saha, S., Arbelaez, J. J., Beach, M. C., & Cooper, L. A. (2004). Racial and ethnic differences in patient perceptions of bias and cultural competence in health care. Journal of general internal medicine, 19(2), 101-110.
Laurencin, C. T., & McClinton, A. (2020). The COVID-19 pandemic: a call to action to identify and address racial and ethnic disparities. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 1-5.