President Donald Trump said Wednesday that his administration is implementing a comprehensive strategy for distressed communities that have been hard hit by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the coronavirus.
“We are determined to protect our African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans who have been hit so hard by this hidden enemy,” the president said during the White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing on Wednesday. “My administration is pursuing a comprehensive strategy in these communities supporting both health and economic revitalization.”
In the small business relief bill passed by the U.S. Senate, about $30 billion in loans are reserved for small financial institutions in minority and distressed communities.
The bill is expected to be passed in the House in the very near future.
Other measures that the Trump administration is taking include providing more support to community health care centers in these impacted communities, as well as expanding their access to telehealth and the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council.
Trump said that $1.4 billion had already been sent to 13,000 community health care centers last month to increase testing and treatment in underserved areas.
Dr. Jerome Adams, the U.S. Surgeon General, explained that the Feds are using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to identify vulnerable communities.
“We’re using CDC provided data to locate sites and counties that are under-tested and socially vulnerable, especially with high populations of black, Hispanic, rural, and native Americans,” he said.
The CDC identifies vulnerable areas with the following main themes: social-economic status, household composition, disability, minority status, and house type.
The numbers are considered inaccurate by many because of a lag in data collection by governments as well as significant underreporting of known cases and deaths by regimes like the CCP in mainland China.
There are over 839,000 confirmed cases and 46,583 deaths in the United States, the data shows.
On Friday, the CDC released its first breakdown case data for COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP virus, according to race, revealing that 30 percent of patients in the country who disclosed their race were black.
The federal data was missing racial information for 75 percent of all cases, however, and did not include any demographic breakdown for deaths.
An analysis by The Associated Press shows that nearly one-third of those who have died are African American, with black people representing about 14 percent of the population in the areas covered in the analysis.
