COVID “Doesn’t Discriminate,” But Doctors Do

[AFP/Patrick T. Fallon]

By Samantha Grasso

A year into the pandemic, COVID-19 continues to expose racism in the health care system – sometimes in terribly intimate ways.

In an interview with AJ+ producer Hangda Zhang earlier this month, Leslie Mac, a digital strategist and community organizer who is Black, reflected on the different experiences that she and her husband, who is white, had when they tested positive for COVID-19.

Mac, who lives in North Carolina, tested positive last month after a visit from her family. The clinic where she received the rapid response test told her to go home, but didn’t provide any information or paperwork about how to care for herself. The clinic doctor did, however, tell Mac that she needed to lose weight.

After that comment, Mac said, she didn’t want to ask the doctor any other questions. “I just felt like this was not somebody that I could trust,” she said.

When Mac got home, she immediately called her primary care physician. The office told her that the doctor would call back the next day. When the doctor didn’t call, she tried to schedule a telehealth appointment, but “that appointment never materialized. It’s been over two and a half weeks since my diagnosis and I'm still sick and he hasn’t called me once, even though [the office is] very aware,” Mac said.

When she sought care information from her community on Twitter, Mac was connected with a grassroots COVID-19 assistance group called Survivor Corps, which recommended over-the-counter vitamins and medications to help her avoid going to the hospital. Mac also learned that she qualified for a type of treatment which the FDA had approved late last year called a monoclonal antibody infusion, and which people such as former President Donald Trump and Rudy Guiliani have used after they contracted the virus. The treatment, a two-hour process involving an IV infusion, had the potential to lessen Mac’s most severe symptoms, and keep her from going to the hospital.

Mac said Survivor Corps called several hospitals in North Carolina to see which ones were providing the treatment. However, she still needed to get approval from her primary doctor. With no appointment still, Mac’s husband went into the doctor’s office to get Mac approved for the infusion.

“He kind of went up there, sort of waving his fist and saying, ‘Hey, I want my wife to get this. She qualifies for it. Here's the paperwork from the FDA. Can you just fill out the form and send it back?’ And by the time he had gotten home, that had all been done and I was approved, and I was able to go and get scheduled for the treatment that following day,” Mac said.

Mac’s husband also tested positive for COVID-19 shortly before her interview with AJ+. After he left a message with their primary care physician, the doctor called him back immediately. She said she listened to her doctor talk to her husband over the phone, telling him what symptoms he could expect and which over-the-counter medications he could take.

“I found myself just getting really sad, because here is my husband and I, going to the same practice with the same primary care physician, and yet we received such different treatments. And I can't help but note that my husband is a white man and I'm a Black woman,” Mac said. “And it was just really hard not to see the difference in care and concern for each of us, despite the fact that we were … positive for COVID within a week of one another.”

Mac related her experience to other ways in which Black women in the U.S. are neglected by the health care system. Black women, for example, have high rates of maternal mortality. The system is “doing what it always does, which is prioritizing whiteness and devaluing the needs and pain of Black people and Black communities,” Mac said.

However, she’s found hope in Black health care worker coalitions such as We Got Us, a Boston-area project focused on educating the community about COVID-19.

“What's been buoying for me is … a lot of amazing Black doctors and Black health care professionals that are forming coalitions to really address this at the systemic level, and directly with our communities themselves,” Mac said. “Because what happens is that the distrust is so high, generally speaking, and then we add into it experiences like mine, which only further detach us from health care systems and make us less willing to interact with them. That causes us to just linger in pain."

Watch Hangda Zhang’s full video on how the pandemic is playing out a year later here.

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It has been one year since WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

Many U.S. cities, as well as regions across the world, have been under some level of lockdown or restriction mandate since. pic.twitter.com/wACUkzXXcP

— AJ+ (@ajplus) March 12, 2021

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