Deep Racial and Socioeconomic Divides Are Shaping the Events of 2020.

What will future research on the three pivotal events of 2020—the COVID-19 pandemic, massive unemployment, and widespread civil unrest after police killings of Black people—discover about how each affected the health of populations?

In a recent viewpoint article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dean Sandro Galea and research fellow Salma Abdalla argue that the central narrative that should emerge from eventual critical examination of this seemingly interminable year is the role of the nation’s underlying socioeconomic and racial divides in “making the US vulnerable to, and shaping the contours of, each of the events of 2020.”