How can the US maintain COVID-era reductions in economic and health disparities?
- 3 min. read ▪ Published
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government injected trillions of dollars into the United States economy. That outpouring decreased economic disparities between African Americans and whites, reports Lonnie R. Snowden, Professor of Health Policy and Management at UC Berkeley School of Public Health.
In an essay in the Journal of Public Health Policy, Snowden analyzes the COVID funds’ impact in reducing racial inequities in economic well-being, insurance coverage, vaccination rates, and evictions between 2020 and 2023; and proposes ways to continue that progress.
His report, with co-author Genevieve Graaf of the University of Texas at Arlington, follows Snowden’s earlier work on the impact of COVID-19 on African Americans.
“Here we focus directly on COVID response policy as implemented and ask: How much did aggressive COVID-19 remediation and recovery policy prevent socioeconomic and health-related decline for everyone, and, in this context, how much did it avoid exacerbating African Americans already great SDOH [social determinants of health] disadvantages?” the authors wrote.
The answer, Snowden found, was that the COVID economic stimulus policies and tax relief made an enormous difference. Those programs included cash payments, extension of unemployment and insurance, greater Earned Income Tax Credit payments, the Child Tax Credit and expansion of eligibility for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
“The differential impact of income support was felt immediately in bank balances,” he wrote, “as generous federal spending boosted African Americans’ checking accounts more than whites.’ Federal support cushioned the impact of African Americans’ lower incomes and lesser wealth.”
“Everyone withstood economic and social adversity better than expected, and amid a favorable response overall, African American-white disparities did not widen and sometimes even shrank… Eviction disparities, primed to surge, fell instead.”
In an interview, Snowden said that he was surprised by what he found.
“I thought this would be another instance where African Americans really did badly, and where COVID would reinforce the existing disparities and social determinants,” he said. “When everybody does poorly, African Americans do worse than everybody else, and they take longer to recover what they lost. That’s a pattern that goes way back.”
But, when Snowden started investigating economic and health disparities during the early years of COVID, he found it wasn’t true.
“To me, that was a really big and important finding,” he said, “because we are always pessimistic, me included, about the ability to improve the lot of African Americans—and we actually did.”
It wasn’t all positive, however. Snowden found that some educational disparities between African Americans and whites widened during that time, specifically academic achievement in K-12 and college attendance.
But overall, he said, the policies made a huge dent in poverty, especially for African Americans. Which raises the question, how can such progress be continued?
To Snowden, one easy fix would be re-introducing the Child Tax Credit, which gave a temporary deduction of $3,600 for each child.
“That’s just an example,” he said. “It’s part of the message of the paper. Often when we propose policies to improve the lot of everybody, especially African Americans, there are questions about feasibility. You know, ‘Is this really within reach? How will it be done? Who will run it?”’
“Here, we did it, exactly. We did it. And so, we can do it again.”