Colin Kaepernick donates $100K to help minorities 'disproportionately devastated' by coronavirus pandemic
Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick has contributed $100,000 to a coronavirus relief fund that is helping black and brown communities amid the deadly pandemic.
The fund was launched via the now-turned activist's 'Know Your Rights' campaign. The funds will go towards food, shelter, education, personal protective gear and incarcerated people to help contain the spread of the virus.
The fund will provide aid to underprivileged populations. Kaepernick shared a video on social media on April 16 and said, "Join us in our mission to help address the disproportionate affect the pandemic is having on our communities. Black and brown communities are being disproportionately devastated by COVID-19 because of hundreds of years of structural racism."
"That’s why we’ve established the ‘Know Your Rights’ Camp COVID-19 Relief Fund to help address these issues. We need each other now more than ever," he said in the video. While most states have not revealed any racial and ethnic data on the infections, early reports in cities like Chicago and Detroit suggest that the virus has affected African American and Latino communities.
Many of these communities have pre-existing conditions, jobs that can't be done from home and are little less likely to trust their doctors, NBC reports. According to an earlier report by The Washington Post, African Americans are dying at a "disproportionately high rate".
The reports also stated that a majority of black counties have "three times the rate of infection" and around "six times" the rate of deaths compared to white counties.
Dr Anthony Fauci, who is a National Institutes of Health infectious disease expert, said, "As Dr (Deborah) Birx said correctly, it’s not that they are getting infected more often, it’s that when they do get infected, their underlying medical conditions — the diabetes, hypertension, the obesity, the asthma — those are the kind of things that wind them up in the ICU and ultimately give him a higher death rate."
"When all this is over and, as we said, it will end, we will get over coronavirus, but there will still be health disparities which we really do need to address in the African American community," he added while speaking at a White House press conference on April 7.
He recently spoke to 'The Ingraham Angle' on April 16 only hours after the White House revealed its coronavirus task force's guidelines to ease lockdowns and restrictions. "(The White House plan) is a gradual process (that) takes into account that we have a heterogeneous dynamic of outbreaks throughout the country," he said.
"California is really different than New Orleans. It is really different than New York or Detroit... places like Arkansas and New Mexico are very different. So what this plan does (is), it creates a baseline of a starting point, which we call the gating, where you have to have a certain degree of indication that the outbreak is decreasing over a period of time," he added.
There are currently 2,249,717 confirmed cases of coronavirus globally with around 154,271 deaths, as per data from John Hopkins University as of April 18. The United States has seen around 706,779 confirmed cases of COVID-19 so far with around 37,079 deaths.