NEW YORK (AP) – A year ago, Elvia Banuelos’ life looked up. The 39-year-old mother of two young children said she feels confident about a new job at management level at the US Census Bureau – she will earn money to supplement the child support she receives to keep her children healthy, happy and in the day care. .
But when the coronavirus was declared a global pandemic last March, which forced hundreds of millions of people to strict lockdown, changed Banuelos’ prospects. The new job expired, child support was discontinued due to job loss and she became a stay-at-home mom when daycare closed.
“The only thing I could do was rent my rent, so everything was difficult,” said Banuelos, of Orland, California.
Millions of Americans experienced a devastating toll during the year-long coronavirus pandemic, from lost loved ones to lost work. More than 530,000 people died in the United States. These losses did not affect all Americans equally, and communities of color were particularly hard hit by both the virus and the economic consequences.
A new poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that black and Hispanic Americans compared to white Americans experienced more jobs and other income losses during the pandemic, and that those who lost income were more likely to have find themselves in deep financial holes.
In addition, black and Hispanic Americans are more likely than white Americans to say they are close to someone who has died of COVID-19 and less likely to receive a vaccination.. According to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, black and Hispanic Americans were killed at the rate disproportionate to their population in the US.
Banuelos, who identifies himself as Latina, said the differences in pandemic experiences between ‘the upper class and people in a more severe situation’ became very clear to her early in the pandemic. Even after two rounds of federal direct stimulus checks, she felt she was further behind than affluent Americans.
The relief “did not last long,” Banuelos said.
Overall, 62% of Hispanic Americans and 54% of black Americans lost some form of household income during the pandemic, including job losses, wage savings, reduced hours and unpaid leave, compared to 45% of the white Americans.
For other racial and ethnic groups, including Asian and Native Americans, the sample size is too small to analyze in the AP-NORC poll.
Jeremy Shouse, a restaurant manager from North Carolina, saw that his hours in the early months of the pandemic were significantly reduced when the small business was forced to close. Shouse, a black man of 33, said the restaurant has since reopened, but that some days it made more than $ 5,000 a day before the pandemic, to just $ 200.
“One year later and things are still not the same,” Shouse said, saying his wages had dropped by 20%.
About 6 in ten Hispanics and about half of black Americans say their households are still experiencing the effects of the loss of income due to the pandemic, compared to about 4 in 10 white Americans. Black and Hispanic Americans will also especially say that the impact was a big impact.
“We find that systemic racism plays a big role in this process,” said Rashawn Ray, a fellow in management studies at the Brookings Institute, who co-authored a recent report on racial differences and the pandemic in Detroit. “I think what we’re going to see once the dust settles is that the racial wealth gap has actually widened.”
There have long been racial differences in the way Americans experience economic downturns and recessions. However, after a recovery from the Great Recession and into the Trump administration, the unemployment gap between black and white Americans narrowed amid strong job growth and economic activity. But a recent analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that a gap that narrowed to as little as 3 percentage points rose to 5.4 percentage points last August, erasing profits during the recovery.
The AP-NORC poll also believes that Spanish Americans in particular will think it will take a long time to get themselves out of the financial hole. About half of Hispanic Americans say they are still experiencing the effects of losing income and that it will take at least six months to recover financially. About a third of black Americans say the same thing, compared to about a quarter of white Americans.
Forty-one percent of Hispanic Americans say their current household income was lower than at the beginning of the pandemic, compared to 29% of Black Americans and 25% of White Americans.
About 4 out of ten black and Hispanic Americans could not pay a bill in the past month, compared to about 2 out of ten white Americans.
For coloreds, the trauma experienced as a result of economic turmoil is exacerbated by tremendous personal losses. About 30% of Black and Hispanic Americans say they have a close friend or family member who has died from the coronavirus since last year, compared to 15% of white Americans.
Debra Fraser-Howze, founder of Choose Healthy Life, an initiative that seeks to address the difference in public health by the black church, said she is confident in the ability of the Black community to recover economically and medically.
“The emergency in the community is sad,” Fraser-Howze said, “and it’s going to get worse. But we’re a community of survivors – we came through slavery and Jim Crow. We’ve figured out how to survive. I believe and believe that our community will return. “
___
Swanson reports from Washington. Morrison, who reported from New York, and Stafford, who reported from Detroit, are members of the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team.
___
The AP-NORC survey of 1,434 adults was conducted from February 25 to March 1, using a sample from the NORC-based AmeriSpeak panel, designed to be representative of the American population. The sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.