COVID-19: Equity & Community in the Health System

Tikkun Olam Coordinating Team is proud to present the first session of the FACING SYSTEMIC RACISM Series. Through reading, presentations, and discussion, we hope to elucidate many layers of systemic racism, and better understand how to begin to make changes in our well-intentioned communities of GJC and West Mt Airy. We hope to address inequity and injustice in our society and work towards altering the economic, legal, health, education, and political systems.

Across the nation and here in Philadelphia, Black and Latinx people have been experiencing substantially higher rates of illness, hospitalization, and death from COVID-19 than white people. Those disparities are driven by systemic racism as are their higher rates of conditions like diabetes and tobacco use. That means that these groups are much less likely to be able to work remotely and are more likely to live in crowded housing where it is difficult to safely isolate or quarantine. Dr. Cheryl Bettigole will begin this session with a review of the Philadelphia Department of Public Health’s COVID-19 Racial Equity Response Plan and the process through which it was created. A discussion will follow her talk.

Dr. Cheryl Bettigole is the Director of the Division of Chronic Disease and Injury Prevention and the Director for Health Equity for the Philadelphia Department of Health. She is a board-certified family physician. Her current work focuses on achieving health justice in Philadelphia.

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