Haven't heard if controlled hypertension and diabetes or heart disease being treated as the same effect as untreated.
Perhaps they get lower quality care, but that's a claim that needs proof.
Perhaps they show up later, and early treatment reduces the risk of death.
Perhaps there are geographic issues involved--less social distancing. One conservative pointed out that the (D) and (R) views of this disease really differ, to a great extent by geography. Take my view--"social distancing" is a snap, since I'm in a house, have a car to get to stores when I need to, have a yard to be outside in and if I walk down the street there may only be 1 or 2 other people visible in a stretch of 3 blocks. And most of those will be in yards, washing cars, etc. The stores I go to are large because land prices are low. I can afford to buy what I need week by week (and that's only because I've taken to salads, and after 8 days or so the greens aren't so green anymore--otherwise I could go once a month.) Now move into a city, where you might live in an apt., have to deal with fairly narrow hallways, stairwells/elevators, more crowded sidewalks, mostly smaller stores, and public transportation. I've gone days where I don't get within 6 feet of others except my nuclear family without calling it "social distancing."
Oh--and I can work from home. So can my wife. I've left jobs out, but if I worked in a blue-collar job it's less likely I'd be able to work from home.
There might also be more social issues involved. I'm fairly rule bound. I'm told to keep my distance, I keep my distance. At Walmart today (oddly, they have a suitable green grocery section--no nopales or daikon, but Napa cabbage and jicama) some of us were keeping our distance. Others were oblivious to the entire thing. Some seemed to think that wherever they were was their personal fiefdom, with no expectation of situational awareness and getting out the way of others. I've noticed in class that "middle class" (I'm using the term loosely here) kids or those whose parents are trying to be socially mobile and got their kids to buy into the idea often observe social niceties, boundaries, that sort of thing. They're aware of others' expectations and either address them explicitly to renegotiate them or they abide by them if they seem reasonable, even if they're a bit inconvenient. It's the outliers, the kids of parents who feel entitled or benefit from entitlements who tend to be, "Fuck you, why should I care what *you* think?" Then again, maybe I'm just using a schema from 1960s/70s social linguistics to explain speech patterns. If I'm even partly right, it means that some classes of people will be more likely to observe social distancing than others. And while this is a *class* thing, there's a non-trivial correlation between class and race/ethnicity in the US.
There's also a correlation between class and family size. If the typical white family is smaller than the typical black family, and the virus is spreading within families, you might also get part of the variance accounted for.
Those are just thoughts off the top of my head. People might object, saying I'm blaming the victim. But unless there's something genetic that makes AA more liable to dying from this or there just happened to be a more virulent strain in Chicago/Cook County, it's got to go to something behavioral or environmental. Doesn't mean people don't get ticked off; it just means they're a bit off base. I watched one defense of wet markets in Wuhan, basically saying you can't blame the culture or a cultural practice. When, in fact, if not for the wet markets and their analogs in Africa, we'd be unlikely to have SARS, HIV, or Ebola. Camel racing (and eating) accounts for MERS. If BSE had been a thing, cattle raising would have been responsible for that. And swine are notorious for spreading disease, with one pundit describing the Spanish explorers in the American South as being enveloped in a "porcine haze," and noting that 50 years after the porkers (the suidae, not the Spaniards) arrived many of the Native American settlements or explorers had noted were abandoned or had experienced sharp declines. But they ate pork.
The numbers are big enough that it's not likely to be a statistical fluke, but it's also possible. There was a notorious chromate toxicity situation years that occurred in conjunction with a big uptick in certain diseases. The correlation was taken as evidence of causation, since it was so unlikely. A later metanalysis said that while it was unlikely in any given area, over the long run and over the entire country it would have been improbable that such a local concentration of diseases like that *wouldn't* have happened. I think there were similar results in Detroit/MI, so it's likely to be a real effect (but you still have to rule out chance).
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