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COVID-19 in New York City

An Ecology of Race and Class Oppression

  • Book
  • © 2021

Overview

Authors:
  1. Deborah Wallace

    1. Independent Disease Ecologist, New York, USA

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    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

  2. Rodrick Wallace

    1. Division of Epidemiology, NYS Psychiatric Institute, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, USA

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

  • Is the first social epidemiological study of COVID-19 spread in the primary U.S. epicenter
  • Uses sophisticated methods from ecosystem analysis and epidemiology to study the sociogeographic diffusion of COVID-19, adapted directly from methods developed with the master geographer Peter Gould to analyze the spread of the AIDS pandemic. Nobody else has applied these methods to COVID-19
  • Makes explicit the long timeline of policies that greatly amplified the catastrophe in New York City and provides the context for the high mortality rates in communities of color
  • Further relates the pandemic to agribusiness and land use policies
  • Is an exemplary study in health disparities

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Public Health (BRIEFSPUBLIC)

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Table of contents (6 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xi
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Premature Death Rate Geography in New York City: Implications for COVID-19

    • Deborah Wallace, Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 1-18

  3. NYC COVID Markers at the ZIP Code Level

    • Deborah Wallace, Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 19-44

  4. Prospero’s New Castles: COVID Infection and Premature Mortality in the NY Metro Region

    • Deborah Wallace, Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 45-55

  5. Pandemic Firefighting vs. Pandemic Fire Prevention

    • Deborah Wallace, Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 57-64

  6. Conclusion: Scales of Time in Disasters

    • Deborah Wallace, Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 65-73

  7. Correction to: COVID-19 in New York City

    • Deborah Wallace, Rodrick Wallace
    Pages C1-C1

  8. Back Matter

    Pages 75-77
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Keywords

About this book

This book is the first social epidemiological study of COVID-19 spread in New York City (NYC), the primary epicenter of the United States. New York City spread COVID-19 throughout the United States. The context of epicenter formation determined the rapid, extreme rise of NYC case and mortality rates. Decades of public policies destructive of poor neighborhoods of color heavily determined the spread within the City. Premature mortality rates revealed the "weathering" of policy-targeted communities: accelerated aging due to chronic stress. COVID attacks the elderly more severely than those under the age of 60. Communities with high proportions of prematurely aged residents proved fertile ground for COVID illness and mortality. The very public policies that created swaths of white wealth across much of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn destroyed the human diversity needed to ride out crises.

 Topics covered within the chapters include:
  •  Premature Death Rate Geography in New York City: Implications for COVID-19
  •  NYC COVID Markers at the ZIP Code Level
  •  Prospero's New Castles: COVID Infection and Premature Mortality in the NY Metro Region
  •  Pandemic Firefighting vs. Pandemic Fire Prevention
  •  Conclusion: Scales of Time in Disasters

An exemplary study in health disparities, COVID-19 in New York City: An Ecology of Race and Class Oppression is essential reading for social epidemiologists, public health researchers of health disparities, those in public service tasked with addressing these problems, and infectious disease scientists who focus on spread in human populations of new zoonotic diseases. The brief also should appeal to students in these fields, civil rights scholars, science writers, medical anthropologists and sociologists, medical and public health historians, public health economists, and public policy scientists.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Independent Disease Ecologist, New York, USA

    Deborah Wallace

  • Division of Epidemiology, NYS Psychiatric Institute, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, USA

    Rodrick Wallace

About the authors

Deborah Wallace, PhD, received her PhD in symbiosis ecology from Columbia University in New York City in 1971. In 1972, she became an environmental studies manager at Consolidated Edison Co. and participated in pioneering environmental impact assessment. She became a manager of biological and public health studies at New York State Power Authority in 1974 and remained there until early 1982. In 1980 she completed a MiniResidency in epidemiology at Mount Sinai Medical Center. In the mid-1970s, she also founded Public Interest Scientific Consulting Service, which produced impact assessments of massive cuts in fire service in New York City. She also probed the health threats that plastics in fires posed to firefighters and became an expert witness in litigation for plaintiffs in large fires fueled by plastics. From 1985 to 1991, she worked for Barry Commoner at the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College. From 1991 to 2010, she tested consumer productsand services for their environmental and health impacts at Consumers Union. She retired in 2010 but continues data analysis, research, and scientific publications. Her first paper was published in 1975, and her last publication, a book, in 2019.


Rodrick Wallace, PhD, is a research scientist in the Division of Epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, affiliated with Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry in New York City. He has an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a PhD in physics from Columbia University, and completed postdoctoral training in the epidemiology of mental disorders at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He worked as a public interest lobbyist, including two decades conducting empirical studies of fire service deployment, and subsequently received an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In addition to material on public health and public policy, he has published peer reviewed studies modeling evolutionary process and heterodox economics, as well as many quantitative analyses of institutional and machine cognition. He publishes in the military science literature, and in 2019 received one of the U.K. MoD RUSI Trench Gascoigne Essay Awards.

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