COVID-19, Race, and Redlining

Discussion on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on African Americans has
been at center stage since the outbreak of the epidemic in the United States. To
present day, however, lack of race-disaggregated individual data has prevented a
rigorous assessment of the extent of this phenomenon and the reasons why blacks
may be particularly vulnerable to the disease. Using individual and georeferenced
death data collected daily by the Cook County Medical Examiner, we provide first
evidence that race does affect COVID-19 outcomes. The data confirm that in Cook
County blacks are overrepresented in terms of COVID-19 related deaths since—as
of June 16, 2020—they constitute 35 percent of the dead, so that they are dying at
a rate 1.3 times higher than their population share.
Furthermore, by combining the spatial distribution of mortality with the 1930s
redlining maps for the Chicago area, we obtain a block group level panel dataset
of weekly deaths over the period January 1, 2020-June 16, 2020, over which we
establish that, after the outbreak of the epidemic, historically lower-graded neighborhoods display a sharper increase in mortality, driven by blacks, while no pretreatment differences are detected. Thus, we uncover a persistence influence of the
racial segregation induced by the discriminatory lending practices of the 1930s, by
way of a diminished resilience of the black population to the shock represented by
the COVID-19 outbreak. A heterogeneity analysis reveals that the main channels of
transmission are socioeconomic status and household composition, whose influence
is magnified in combination with a higher black share.