1 Topic: Health as a Social Problem
By now, we probably can all tell a story about how COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus (Coronavirus N.d.), has impacted our lives. Some of us have had family members or friends pass away. Some of us are still experiencing lingering symptoms from a COVID-19 infection, called long-haul or long COVID-19. Some of our kids felt achy or tired for a day and then got better. Some of us may not know anyone who was personally affected by COVID-19. Pause for a moment to think about your own COVID-19 health story and consider how this disease has affected society in the United States and worldwide.
However, we have learned that some social groups are more likely to be infected, hospitalized, and even die as a result of contracting COVID-19. The table in Figure 1 shows rates of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths due to COVID-19 by race and ethnicity as of July 2020. As you can see, non-Hispanic Black people died from COVID-19 at a rate twice that of White people during this time. Please take a moment to look race the other ethnicity related to race and ethnicity in this table.
Perhaps you noticed that the data show a gap between White non-Hispanic Americans and American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian, Black people, and Latinx people. As you can see in the table, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths for all racial and ethnic groups except for Asians are substantially higher than for Whites. This experience of inequality demonstrates that health and illness can be social problems.
This chapter will explore the social elements of health, a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity (World Health Organization 1946). We will look more deeply at why health is a social problem. We will explore collective and individual models of the social determinants of health. Asocial determinants of health of the social determinants of health, we will include the experience of individual and generational trauma as a factor in health outcomes. We will examine how sociologists make sense of health and illness by considering how these understandings develop over time. Like many other social problems, government policies and practices influence access to health resources and health outcomes. We will look at the differences in health systems internationally and decide if these systemic differences support health for everyone. Finally, we will come back to our own COVID-19 stories. The pandemic has both exposed and worsened existing inequalities. The pandemic is also inspiring creative action from individuals, communities, and governments. These generous responses demonstrate our interdependence and the need for the social justice of health.
Even with our brief explanation of COVID-19 statistics in the introduction of this chapter, we see that people experience unequal health outcomes based on their race and ethnicity. This is the health dimension of inequalit