Health

COVID-19 has spread to rural counties in Kansas and Missouri, leading to spikes in cases that weren’t seen in the earliest stages of the pandemic. A combination of factors — population size and distribution, the presence of meatpacking facilities, and COVID-19 outreach programs — is affecting how these areas are responding to the virus. Many high-risk neighborhoods are also more likely to be low-income, immigrant communities, many of whom work in rural Kansas and Missouri meatpacking plants.

In Kansas, Latinx people contract COVID-19 at a rate 5.7 times that of non-Hispanic residents for cases in which ethnicity was reported — 22.9% of cases are missing ethnicity data. Latinx people accounted for almost half of COVID-19 cases in Wyandotte County, where 29.8% of the population is Latinx, for cases where ethnicity data is known. Latinx people also face greater disparities in accessing testing.

COVID-19 is shining a light on health disparities that the Black community faces, but it isn’t the first disease to do so. In addition to higher rates of COVID-19, Black people in the Kansas City area have access to fewer permanent testing sites than the white population. The health disparities behind increased cases of COVID-19 among the Black community in Kansas City can be traced to several factors.

In Kansas City — and similarly across the U.S. — racial and ethnic minorities face worse outcomes and greater disparities when it comes to catching, surviving and being tested for COVID-19. In both Missouri and Kansas, Black people are contracting COVID-19 at rates higher than their share of the state population. On both sides of the state line, Black people are dying at a rate over two times their population share.