Structural inequalities exacerbate infection disparities

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the world witnessed a disproportionate infection rate among marginalized and low-income groups. Despite empirical evidence suggesting that structural inequalities in society contribute to health disparities, there has been little attempt to offer a computational and theoretical explanation to establish its plausibility and quantitative impact. Here, we focus on two aspects of structural inequalities: wealth inequality and social segregation. Our computational model demonstrates that (a) due to the inequality in self-quarantine ability, the infection gap widens between the low-income and high-income groups, and the overall infected cases increase, (b) social segregation between different socioeconomic status (SES) groups intensifies the disease spreading rates, and (c) the second wave of infection can emerge due to a false sense of safety among the medium and high SES groups. By performing two data-driven analyses, one on the empirical network and economic data of 404 metropolitan areas of the United States and one on the daily Covid-19 data of the City of Chicago, we verify that higher segregation leads to an increase in the overall infection cases and higher infection inequality across different ethnic/socioeconomic groups. These findings together demonstrate that reducing structural inequalities not only helps decrease health disparities but also reduces the spread of infectious diseases overall.