Thomas Breen Photo
Funeral of New Haven’s first Covid-19 victim, Curtis Hunt.
(Updated) Officially, New Haven Tuesday reported its seventh case of an African-American resident dying from Covid-19.
Meanwhile, funeral directors have buried at least 14 African-American New Haveners who died from Covid-19.
And the number is climbing daily.
The disparity in the counts reflects the difficulty of keeping on top of statistics in the fast-moving pandemic, which is taking a disproportionate toll on the African-American community both here and nationwide.
The city gets its official statistics from the state Department of Health’s database, said Health Director Maritza Bond. She then double-checks those statistics against each death certificate before reporting death counts — because incorrect information from the state at one point had the city reporting the death of a person who had actually survived.
As of mid-Tuesday, the city had confirmed 18 total deaths of New Haveners so far from Covid-19, Bond said. Seven of the victims were African-American. (The races of the two most recent victims weren’t yet known.)
Meanwhile, Howard K. Hill said his funeral home has already buried 10 African-American victims of the disease who live within New Haven city limits, three within the past 24 hours.
McClam Funeral Home has buried another four, according to Director Darrell McClam.
Messages seeking numbers from Curvin K. Council Funeral Home, which also serves the African-American community, were not returned by the time this story went to press.
“Everybody’s not being counted. The city’s numbers are way off,” Darrell McClam said.
He suggested that lag time in reporting may be part of the reason. Amid the daily rush of new coronavirus patients his team has been called on to bury statewide, he sometimes doesn’t end up faxing death certificates with official causes of death stated to the state for a few days. “I’m changing my method now” to speed up the process, he said.
Earlier in the pandemic, officials didn’t always recognize right away that Covid-19 had been a primary cause of death, Howard K. Hill added.
“They have underlying medical conditions. They do a test. When it comes time to release the remains, the death certificate is stating it is natural causes. Then I got a call back form the doctor who had to let me know” that Covid-19 was the culprit, he said.
“It’s obviously concerning if there are more deaths than we know about,” Mayor Justin Elicker said Tuesday when told about the conflicting numbers. “We have to find out why.”
When asked again about this disparity during Tuesday’s press conference, Elicker reiterated that the prospect of any difference in data between funeral home directors and that provided to the city by the state is concerning to him.
“It’s hard for us to know what the actual reality is,” he said. Some people tracked by the funeral home directors may actually be from outside of New Haven. He said his team is looking into the source of the potential discrepancy.
The disparity in death counts did not surprise the Rev. Boise Kimber, he said. “We’ve been undercounted for 300 years,” Kimber told the Independent Tuesday. “They don’t count us when we’re hungry. They don’t count us when we’re sick. They count us when they need to get elected.”
Kimber led a press conference Monday of black leaders calling for more attention to Covid-19 among African-Americans, including adding a testing site in the community.
Meanwhile, Howard K. Hill spoke of “the other tragedy to this whole thing ” — the destruction Covid-19 is wreaking on black business, which like other businesses are suffering amid the pandemic but are not generally receiving any of the government help. He called special attention to a new fund that has been created specifically to offer forgivable $20,000 lines of credit to high-risk minority-owned businesses, through the Hartford Economic Development Corporation. So far only 12 black-owned businesses have applied to the fund, lamented Hill, who connected officials to more than 100 potential applicants through a webinar last week. Click here for more information on the program.
Latest Figures
Meanwhile, Elicker and Bond offered more numerical breakdowns Tuesday afternoon during their daily coronavirus-related virtual press briefing, which was held via the Zoom teleconferencing app and on YouTube Live.
Elicker said that the city now has 730 confirmed positive Covid-19 cases and 18 confirmed fatalities.
City of New Haven
According to data provided by the state Department of Public Health and presented by Elicker and Bond Tuesday, 68 local African Americans have been hospitalized due to the novel coronavirus so far. That represents 43 percent of total city resident hospitalizations, with 44 Hispanic people (28 percent) hospitalized, 27 white people (17 percent), and 21 (13 percent) unknown.
“The black community is much more heavily impacted with hospitalizations that are related to Covid-19” than are other local populations, he said. The city is roughly one third black, one third white, and one third Hispanic.
At a previous press conference, Elicker pointed out a variety of socioeconomic and public health reasons why African Americans locally and nationally have been so hard hit, from underlying health conditions related to economic inequality to reliance on public transportation to work in “frontline” jobs that do not allow for telecommuting.
Elicker cautioned that the positive infection data (pictured above) is heavily distorted by a large number of racially unknown positive cases. He and Bond said they have stepped up their pressure on testing sites and the state public health department to collect this demographic data at the point of testing so that the city can best understand who is being impacted and where they live.
Elicker pointed out on a heat map that the hardest hit neighborhoods in terms of cases are pedominantly working class, black and brown areas of the city like Fair Haven, Newhallville, the Hill, Dixwell, and West River.
And the number of Covid-19-related deaths in the city, according to the data about the 16 local deaths that the city knew about when staffers put together today’s charts, reflect that 7 African Americans have died (44 percent of the city’s total deaths), six white people (38 percent), and three Hispanic people (19 percent). (Officials didn’t yet have data on the two most recent deaths.)