Executive Summary:
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, families across Los Angeles County have endured multiple waves of sickness, insecurity, joblessness, learning loss, and challenges to mental health. These impacts have been felt across Angelenos of all spectrums including communities of color: Black Angelenos, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and
Pacific Islanders as well as women, LGBTQIA communities, the young, seniors, and people with disabilities. As of late August, the County was reporting over 225,000 cases and nearly 5,500 deaths, with the case and death rates sharply up in Black, Latino, Native American, and Pacific Islander communities as seen later in this report. These are even possibly more alarming as race/ethnicity data is still not identified for many cases. Economic costs have been uneven as well, with the state reporting that nearly half of Black workers have filed for unemployment since the crisis began through the end of July, well above the twenty-seven percent figure for white workers.
Meanwhile, undocumented Angelenos – 70 percent of whom have been in the United States for a decade or longer – have been largely frozen out of relief. With them and their immediate family members comprising roughly 18 percent of the County, this has been a recipe for regional economic disaster. Add to that the stresses of making rent, the learning loss Black, Latino, and Native American kids on the wrong side of the digital divide, the physical and mental trauma visited on communities by the pandemic, and a lack of health care, and you have a recipe for deepening distress and inequality.
Yet this pattern of pain should have been expected: In many ways, COVID-19 is the disease that has revealed our social illnesses of anti-Black racism, precarious employment, sharp racial gaps in wealth and digital access, unaffordable housing, growing homelessness, unresponsive government, and so much more. Communities shattered, health battered, and businesses shuttered – these are the real costs of the crisis. But these outcomes are not the result of bad luck and misfortune; rather than a bug in the system, they are a feature in which structural racism has long set the fortunes and limited the potential of communities of color, particularly Black and Indigenous people.
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