Mapping the uneven outbreak of Covid-19 in Los Angeles

“What we are seeing is that a lot of families have no choice but to continue their activities as usual,” said Laura Hidalgo, leader of a Covid-19 outreach team for Meet Each Need With Dignity, a nonprofit group based in Pacoima.

In Pacoima – a predominantly Latino neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley where much of our history unfolds – one in five residents has been infected with Covid-19, compared to one in 24 Santa Monica residents, much whiter. The median household income in Pacoima is around $ 56,000, compared to $ 97,000 in Santa Monica.

If you explore the map, other similar contrasts emerge: In El Sereno, a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood with a median household income of around $ 57,000, one in seven residents has been infected. In neighboring Pasadena’s south, a small town with tree-lined streets that often appears in movies as an idyllic American suburb, one in 22 residents has been infected. The median household income is around $ 106,000.

Daniel Flaming, chairman of the nonprofit economic roundtable, told me that the “income polarization” in Los Angeles County, coupled with the fact that many of the region’s lower paid workers are working in the area. service industries where they must interact with customers, made the rise of the county, the most populous in the country, particularly intense.

[See the Covid risk in your county. Hint: It’s probably high, if you live in California.]

But if you zoom in or out, patterns, unevenness, repeat.

As a single reader highlighted on TwitterThe city of Long Beach also has lower rates in its richer, whiter east side zip codes, according to the city’s Department of Health and Human Services website. (Overall, as our map shows, one in 10 Long Beach residents have contracted Covid-19.)

And on a larger scale, researchers at the Community and Labor Center at the University of California, Merced, wrote in a July policy brief that the California summer surge is hammering counties with high concentrations of low-wage workers, including in the Central Valley, where relatively high case rates have persisted throughout the pandemic.