“I wasn’t seeing 60- and 70-year-old men.
“I’ll be 45 this year,” said the University of Michigan professor, who studies racism and health. noticed when he kept seeing online memorials for men his age. And in an analysis for ProPublica this summer using the only reliable data at the time accounting for age, race and gender, from Michigan and Georgia, Harvard researcher Tamara Rushovich found that the disparity was greatest in Black men. One study using data through July found that Black people ages 35 to 44 were dying at nine times the rate of white people the same age, though the gap slightly narrowed later in the year. While COVID-19 has killed 1 out of every 800 African Americans, a toll that overwhelms the imagination, even more stunning is the deadly efficiency with which it has targeted young Black men like Bates. Get Our Top InvestigationsĮmail address This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Five days later he was on a ventilator five days after that, he died. As he preached about Daniel in the lion’s den - we will be tested, but if we continue to have faith, we will come through - he grimaced from the effort.
Online church was a new concept to his parishioners, and during the next morning’s service, he had to keep reminding them to mute their phones. He attributed his malaise to allergies and pushed forward with his second full-time job, as head pastor of Forest Aid Baptist Church, working on his Sunday sermon between naps. The next day, he couldn’t get out of bed.īates was only 36, too young to be at risk for COVID-19, or so the conventional wisdom went. On Friday, March 20, he was coughing and his nose was bleeding. But with classrooms indefinitely closed, he was back on patrol duty and, like most people in those early days of the pandemic, unprotected by a mask. Bates was in his 10th year with the Vidalia Police Department, assigned as a resource officer to the upper elementary school. The arrival of the novel coronavirus in Vidalia, Louisiana, was another burden on a body already breaking under the load. Kejuane Artez Bates was a big man with big responsibilities. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
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