Michigan Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities and Disaggregated Data

On April 7, 2020 — roughly one month after the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Michigan — The Washington Post highlighted the widely disproportionate impact of the virus on Black/African American people: while only 14% of the state’s total population identified as Black/African American, this community comprised 41% of the 845 people who had died (Thebault, et al., 2020). Just two days later, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer established the Michigan Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities. “This virus is holding a mirror up to our society,” said Gov. Whitmer, “and reminding us of the deep inequities in this country” (Executive Order 2020-55, 2020).

The task force — with appointees from state government, universities, and the private, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors — was charged with “improving data collection on racial and ethnic demographic information, and greatly enhancing the sharing and analysis capabilities of equity-related data” (Michigan Coronavirus Racial Disparities Task Force, 2023). In fact, it was only due to the efforts of Michigan and a few other states to collect and publish this type of information that racial disparities were known at all in those first weeks of the pandemic (Thebault, et al., 2020). Without knowledge of these disparities, the task force and its partners in communities across the state would not have been equipped to direct resources to the communities that needed it most.

Joneigh Khaldun, Michigan’s chief medical executive from 2019–2021, was an early champion of race and ethnicity data disaggregation. “Whether it’s the opioid crisis and deaths, maternal deaths, I always encouraged our team,” she said in a 2022 interview, “when you’re looking at data sets, make sure you’re looking at race and ethnicity” (University of Michigan, 2022).