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More than half of the California prison inmates who’ve died after contracting the coronavirus as of early this week had disabilities known to the state corrections department, according to a group of attorneys who are suing the state for better conditions. The lawyers are asking a federal judge overseeing a long-running lawsuit in San Francisco to compel the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to create new policies protecting inmates during the pandemic. (Kristoffersen, 7/18)

Children of color will be disproportionately affected by school reopenings amid the coronavirus pandemic if additional resources are not in place, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Richard Besser said Sunday. “If we’re not intentional about making sure that doesn't happen it will happen,” Besser, the president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a pediatrician,  said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Besser said death rates for Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans “far surpasses their proportion of the population.” (Klar, 7/19)

Even among apparently healthy children, Black patients are almost three and a half times more likely to die within a month after surgery than white patients, according to a new study published in Pediatrics on Monday. While previous research has explored racial disparities in surgical outcomes between adult patients, researchers in Monday’s study focused specifically on healthy children. (Gaffney, 7/20)

Racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to have evidence of severe COVID-19 disease on chest x-rays, according to a study yesterday in Radiology.The study was based on 326 patients hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 infection between Mar 27 and Apr 10, seen by radiologists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Doctors at the hospital noticed non-white patients had significant more lung disease on admitting chest x-rays than white patients and studied the phenomenon. (7/17)

Early on in the pandemic, most public health officials warned older adults to simply stay at home, except to buy food or medicine or exercise outdoors apart from others. Now, with states and cities reopening (and some re-closing) at varying paces, the calculations grow steadily more complicated. “Lots of people are really agonizing about what to do and whom to have faith in,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University.(Span, 7/17)