Systemic racism has led to poor care, limited access to treatment

As we learn more about racial gaps in the treatment of “long COVID” (“Tracking lingering effects of COVID-19: Groups hit hardest may be less likely to get care,” Page A1, March 8), efforts to address pervasive illness should follow a multipronged approach. This work should include funding for community-based organizations, outreach through grass-roots organizers and unions, workplace accommodations, housing stability, and policies for long-term unemployment compensation.

Racial inequities in COVID-19 care extend long trends in health care. Systemic racism has consistently led to poor care and limited access to novel treatments. Two decades after the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine produced the report “Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care,” divides persist, as a February report from Stat shows. This pattern will continue as long as we live in a racialized society.

Racial capitalism is responsible for structural racism. Society produces a system in which people of color are commodified and dominant societal messages negate their human value. Commodification contributes to a narrative in which people of color who describe symptoms of fatigue are denied resources.

Racial capitalism isn’t subtle, but it is pervasive and insidious. It fuels a dominant narrative that will keep creating inequities in health, in health care, and in chances at life until it is dismantled.

Linda Sprague Martinez

Dawn Belkin Martinez

Boston

The writers, who are not related, are faculty members at the Boston University School of Social Work.

Nursing home residents continue to be overlooked

The group that I believe has been hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic does not even get a mention in the front-page article “Tracking lingering effects of COVID-19,” and one wonders whether this group is getting any care at all for long COVID illnesses. The people who need attention are, of course, the surviving residents of nursing and veterans’ facilities. Regretfully, this group continues to be neglected.

As of Dec. 31, 2021, 5,735 residents of nursing homes in Massachusetts had died of COVID, about one-quarter of all COVID deaths in the state. Given that, on any day, there are about 40,000 state nursing home residents, it stands to reason that over the course of the pandemic, tens of thousands of them survived COVID. If 10 percent to 30 percent of the survivors have long COVID, who is caring for them?

As for trauma, the situation of the survivors of COVID and all elders and people with disabilities in the residences must have been grimmer than we have been told, since not only were they sequestered but they also knew they were the largest target of the spreading disease.

Let the recovery clinics look to them. Let the National Institutes of Health’s RECOVER study, which includes six Boston-area teaching hospitals, enroll them. It’s time to transcend a scandalous history of neglect.

Dorothy Weitzman

Newton

The writer is a member of the Dignity Alliance of Massachusetts.