Saturday, June 27, 2020 | 2 a.m.
Nevada health officials have already reported that COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting some populations more than others, particularly those in marginalized and lower-income communities that experience inferior health, housing and economic conditions.
Now, new research suggests that members of the LGBTQ community are among those facing a higher risk due to those conditions. The Williams Institute, a UCLA think tank focusing on sexual orientation and gender identity, reported that 22% of LGBTQ people live in poverty, 8 percentage points more than their straight, cisgender counterparts.
The likelihood of a COVID-19 case ending in death increases dramatically for those experiencing poverty or other underlying inequalities in society, according to the Imperial College London.
Vince Collins, director of operations at the LGBTQ Community Center of Southern Nevada, said he's seen some homeless individuals in the community contract the virus, but no deaths. Still, the virus has affected some low-income LGBTQ Southern Nevadans in other ways, including the closure of the center and its HIV testing clinic due to staffing issues related to the pandemic.
"We collaborate with the (Southern Nevada) Health District, and their staff was pulled out because of contact tracing, which consequently meant we couldn’t sustain keeping the clinic open," he said. "It’s been closed all this time, which is huge because we provide free HIV and STD testing for our community."
The impact of the virus has been all-encompassing, Collins said.
"The destabilization of losing your job affects everything," he said. "We've been trying to roll folks onto Medicaid and help them navigate to resources they need for rental assistance."
While statistics show that Black and Asian communities in Clark County have been hit hardest by the virus in Clark County, there's no data available to determine whether COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting the LGBTQ population.
"Overall there’s an issue with a lack of data for LGBTQ populations," said André C. Wade, state director of Silver State Equality, a Nevada LGBTQ civil rights organization. "When something like COVID hits, we already don’t have the data that we need to know exactly how COVID is impacting our community."
Wade said Silver State Equality spoke with Richard Whitley, director of Nevada Department of Health and Human Services, about possibly mandating a statewide collection of data on sexual orientation and gender identity of coronavirus patients.
"We know that the risks are higher, we have the data to support that, we just don’t know what the actual impact is," said Samuel Garrett-Pate, spokesman for Silver State Equality and its counterpart Equality California. "So we can hypothesize that similar to communities of color, risks are higher due to structural issues and disparities in health and well-being that have existed long before COVID-19; similar issues of health and well-being exist for the LGBTQ community."
It’s worth noting that the state already collects sexual orientation information when tracking data on sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.
"The ability is already there, so why would we only be collecting that information when it comes to STDs," Garrett-Pate said. “If we know from that data that diseases like HIV disproportionately affect the LGBTQ community, but especially Black and brown men … wouldn’t we want to know the same thing when it comes to COVID-19?”
Some states have already added LGBTQ-specific information to its data collection, and California lawmakers are also pushing for a bill to make this possible.
In the meantime, the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services is researching a path toward the best method toward data collection, whether it be through an executive order, a legislative action or simply a change in regulations, Wade said.
