The Covid-19 global pandemic has and will continue to take many lives. In addition to an exponentially-growing number of hospitalizations and deaths, its effects are also felt acutely through daily life coming to a standstill. Non-essential businesses have been ordered to close, universities and schools have transitioned to online learning, and many companies have moved to working from home. But do we all have that same luxury?
Nationally, around a quarter of workers are able to work from home. While this number has grown over time, they are still in the minority, and as we might suspect, not a random group. Those who live in metropolitan areas —whether a central city like New York or noncentral city like Westchester— are more than twice as likely (32% vs 15%) to be able to work from home than those in rural areas.
New York City as a whole looks like other metropolitan areas. However, when we break this number down to the borough level, we see a similar metro-rural "inequality". While 33-36% of people in Manhattan and Brooklyn are able to work from home, only 20-26% in the other three boroughs have that same luxury. This puts them somewhere in between metropolitan and rural areas.
Let's look at other ways of segmenting the ability to work from home. The most obvious question to ask is whether the ability to work from home differs based on one's level of education. This turns out to be true, and with a very significant difference.
Explore the other breakdowns. Race and citizenship status are other cases where the ability to work from home is concentrated among certain groups. Most noteworthy, perhaps, is that the gap in ability to work from home between white workers and workers of other —particularly black and hispanic— races is even greater in New York City than the rest of the country, where it is already almost double. On the other hand, men and women in New York and the rest of the U.S. are equally able to work from home.
Disparities in one's ability to work from home means more than just not being able to use Zoom's custom backgrounds for comedic material while videoconferencing. Instead, it highlights who among us is not lucky enough to be quarantined at home. From delivery to sanitary workers and grocery store cashiers to healthcare professionals, not being able to work from home means having to continue using reduced-service (and hence more crammed) public transit, and most likely having to come into contact with many more people, all of which increases one's risk of infection.
Is that what's happening here? Despite making up only 29% of Chicago's population, "61 of their 86 recorded deaths, or 70%, were black residents". New York City's recently released data also shows similar effects, although thankfully to a less extreme extent. Keeping in mind the old adage that correlation does not equal causation —factors like access to healthcare, for example, could be a confounding factor— it is still important to acknowledge these systemic differences in order to correct them.