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According to this article by Nicole Westmen (2020), police violence has been tied to the development of numerous underlying conditions that increase the risk of complications from COVID-19. Furthermore, experiences of police brutality have been shown to foment distrust with other institutions, including medical institutions. As a result, contact tracers are experiencing resistance to divulging such important information as whether or not COVID-19 patients attended a protest and who they might have encountered there, for fear of retaliation.

While it is certain that black communities in the US are being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, the extent to which this is the case is still unknown. In Texas, there is only an 18% gap in the demographic data on the races of positive COVID-19 cases, which is much smaller than the 65% gap nation-wide. Still, this gap means the true prevalence of COVID-19 among black communities could range from being roughly equal to their population share to nearly three times worse (Martinez and Keller 2020). Furthermore, while Texas testing sites are recording the race/ethnicity of people who test positive for COVID-19, these articles in the Austin Statesmen and Austin's local NPR attest to the need to record similar data for rates of hospitalizations and death. Austin-Travis County does not record this data, which is why the City is unable to report any race-related differences in the distribution of COVID-19 fatalities (Platoff 2020). Across the state of Texas, only 1/3 of confirmed COVID-19 fatalities have data of the race or ethnicity of the deceased.