For us, COVID-19 is personal

ABSTRACT

We are colleagues and friends working together in busy emergency departments in Washington DC. As Black physicians working in urban America, we do not find the recent deluge of news reports chronicling the disproportionate effect that the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is having on the disenfranchised and minority populations in our country shocking. We have long been witness to and are in a constant state of alarm over the legal, medical, educational, social and economic inequities faced by the most vulnerable residents of this country.