...It is very much the social determinants that lead to health outcomes: housing, economic instability, education, challenging access to healthy foods, community environments that are filled with stress and are not safe--and then we come to the quality of care. ...

I hope the first lesson that we learn—and this pandemic has shown such a bright light—is that each of us as individuals live in the context of a community of other people, so that when we choose as individuals to exert a right not to wear a mask, and don't care that we could easily sicken or cause someone else to die, that is a major issue now of an ethical and moral nature in front of this society. If we have learned anything, it is that we have to begin to focus our attention on empathy and love, a concern and caring for everyone. For Black people, this is particularly important, because we now realize that Black people, because of a history of deeply planted seeds of distrust, and those seeds being watered every day by our experience in living our lives in American society—that that distrust leads to very negative behaviors. It leads us to make decisions sometimes that are contrary to our best interests. ...The researchers, the clinicians, and the health policy experts have got to come together now and try to do everything we can with the rest of our society to overcome this distrust, because this distrust is not just an idle emotion. Distrust leads to death.

What this does is focus everyone's attention on getting at these structural racism issues, these social determinants of health that were always present in creating excess experiences with disease and death, but now we know what it does [in] a pandemic like COVID-19, and hopefully now it will regenerate a much greater focus on getting at these root and fundamental causes.

—Dr. Reed Tuckson, interviewed on the PBS Newshour, responding to a U.S. government report that, in the first half of 2020, U.S. life expectancy fell by a full year, on average, with Black life expectancy faring the worst of racial/ethnic subgroups— dropping by 2.7 years