Done in collaboration with the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, this report compares the overall Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) death and vaccination rates of Latinos and non-Hispanic whites (NH Whites) and describes the geographic pattern of these rates across neighborhoods in New York City (NYC). As the first major epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, NYC is an important case study. During the initial three months of the pandemic, there were 203,000 confirmed cases with a crude fatality rate of 9.2 percent overall and 32.1 percent among those hospitalized. NYC is home to 2.6 percent of the nation’s population, but 5.7 percent of the nation’s COVID-related deaths occurred there.

The available data on the pandemic reveal that Latinos were disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 infections, hospitalization, and deaths. Given this disparity, prioritizing this population for vaccination is critically important. The effort should focus on immunizing individuals in predominantly Latino neighborhoods to lower contagion risk, given that elevated risks are associated with both individual and neighborhood characteristics. To assess whether vaccines are adequately reaching this population, we analyze available data to compare outcomes for Latinos and NH Whites (see Appendix on the pdf of the report for a more detailed discussion on specific data and methods).

In a collaborative report with the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative (LPPI), CNK and LPPI researchers find that businesses in California’s communities of color are being left behind because they are receiving far less from the $600 billion in loans through the Paycheck Protection Program. The Paycheck Protection Program was established as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) to help certain businesses continue paying their workers.

The new report explicates how the lack of federal support will likely widen economic inequality in communities of color, which already had fewer small businesses and jobs than majority-white neighborhoods. The analysis uses data from the Small Business Administration, the Census Bureau’s ZIP Code Business Patterns Dataset and the American Community Survey.

The researchers write that future federal pandemic relief efforts should earmark a percentage of funds to directly benefit businesses in disadvantaged communities, which the report finds generally have higher concentrations of residents of color.

The necessary lockdowns to reduce the spread of COVID-19, along with the ensuing reduction in consumer demand, have created huge economic challenges for small businesses, especially those owned by Latino or Black business owners. To prevent a massive wave of layoffs and small business closures, the U.S. Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which included over $600 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

In this brief, done in collaboration with UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative, we study the distribution of PPP loans across California’s 53 congressional districts, with an emphasis on the impacts of the distribution of funds on racial equity. We provide findings for three analyses. First, we study the baseline economy in each congressional district to understand any pre-existing inequities in terms of jobs and payroll provided by small businesses. Second, we analyze the ethnoracial composition and socioeconomic status of the congressional districts, grouped by level of PPP support. This allows us to compare the pre-pandemic differences in the economic dynamism of congressional districts with different racial or ethnic compositions. Third, we evaluate PPP’s effectiveness in terms of retaining jobs and maintaining payroll to determine the extent to which the program supported congressional districts with different racial or ethnic compositions.