Finch W Holmes, Hernández Finch Maria E
Department of Educational Psychology, Ball State University, Muncie, IN, United States.
Front Sociol. 2020 Jun 15;5:47. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2020.00047. eCollection 2020.
The Covid-19 pandemic in the winter and spring of 2020 represents a major challenge to the world health care system that has not been seen perhaps since the influenza pandemic in 1918. The virus has spread across the world, claiming lives on all continents with the exception of Antarctica. Since its arrival in the United States, attention has been paid to how Covid-19 cases and deaths have been distributed across varying socioeconomic and ethnic groups. The goal of this study was to examine this issue during the early weeks of the pandemic, with the hope of shedding some light on how the number of cases and the number of deaths were, or were not related to poverty. Results of this study revealed that during the early weeks of the pandemic more disadvantaged counties in the United States had a larger number of confirmed Covid-19 cases, but that over time this trend changed so that by the beginning of April, 2020 more affluent counties had more confirmed cases of the virus. The number of deaths due to Covid-19 were associated with poorer and more urban counties. Discussion of these results focuses on the possibility that testing for the virus was less available in more disadvantaged counties later in the pandemic than was the case earlier, as the result of an overall lack of adequate testing resources across the nation.
2020年冬春之际的新冠疫情对全球医疗体系构成了重大挑战，这或许是自1918年流感大流行以来从未见过的。该病毒已蔓延至全球，除南极洲外各大洲都有死亡病例。自其抵达美国以来，人们一直关注新冠病例和死亡在不同社会经济和种族群体中的分布情况。本研究的目的是在疫情早期几周审视这一问题，以期阐明病例数和死亡数与贫困之间的关系（或不存在的关系）。本研究结果显示，在疫情早期几周，美国处境更为不利的县新冠确诊病例数更多，但随着时间推移这一趋势发生了变化，到2020年4月初，更为富裕的县确诊病例更多。新冠死亡病例数与更贫困和城市化程度更高的县相关。对这些结果的讨论聚焦于这样一种可能性，即由于全国范围内总体缺乏足够的检测资源，在疫情后期处境更为不利的县比早期更难获得病毒检测。
