The trauma and stress police violence cause for black people, and the physical toll of that violence, may contribute to the disparity in COVID-19 deaths, a panel of experts argue.

There are various reasons COVID-19 is killing black people at six times the rate of white people, including a lack of access to health care, and poor environmental conditions in black communities.

“There are levels of chronic stress associated with living in an environment that has more police violence, and the threat of that force on its residents,” says Denise Herd, a professor at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley who recently examined how that stress can lead to disease in a new paper that will appear in the Boston University Law Review.

With the world still in the grips of the pandemic, there is no specific research relating COVID-19 cases to police violence, but Herd says the connection between the chronic stress caused by persistent police-related trauma, and diseases like asthma, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, which has led to COVID-19 mortality, is clear.

Another potentially complicating factor is that asking black people, especially black men, to wear masks, as many public health authorities are requiring, may invite unwarranted attention from police, who have falsely profiled black men as criminals.

“It’s a corollary to the ‘hoodie’ argument from a few years ago, where it is not uncommon for racial minorities wearing hoodies to be considered a threat, while others freely wear them without fear of harassment,” says Osagie Obasogie, a professor of bioethics.

“Everyday racism continues to be a more immediate concern to communities of color than a pandemic, so some people may decline to wear masks,” he adds.

Read the full article about how police violence is affecting black communities by Ivan Natividad at Futurity.