Interesting perspective about race and covid in The Lancet
The excerpts are below

The myth of Black immunity to disease and pain also manifested itself in other violent ways in southern states in the 19th century. As historian Deirdre Cooper Owens has documented in Medical Bondage, the belief that Black skin resisted pain was used as a justification by southern slave doctors such as James Marion Sims to subject enslaved women to repeated surgical experimentation without anaesthetic. Physicians at the time held firmly to the belief that there were vast differences between Black and white bodies; however, when these violent experiments resulted in a surgical method that could successfully close fistulas, this method was quickly applied to white women for their gynaecological ailments. As Cooper Owens has described, medical discourse constructed Black bodies as “medical superbodies” that were perceived as simultaneously biologically inferior while also serving as clinical material that could be subjected to experimentation to discover medical advances that served the health of the white population. Despite this apparent contradiction, the idea of distinct racial physiologies persisted in medical thought.
By the end of Reconstruction after the US Civil War, the notion of fundamental biological difference was so deeply integrated into medical thought that many diseases, such as cancer and sickle cell disease, were thought of in explicitly racial terms. This elevated racial difference as an explanatory factor for disease susceptibility. The result was an ignorance of the structural and social determinants of ill health and the provision of limited resources to ameliorate racial health disparities. For example, as Keith Wailoo has shown, during the 20th century as breast cancer awareness campaigns took a spotlight in public discourse, breast cancer itself was constructed as a “disease of civilization” that disproportionately affected white women. As public health officials took to media depictions of women bravely fighting breast cancer to combat the stigma surrounding the disease, the depicted patients were invariably upper-class white women.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02241-8/fulltext#coronavirus-linkback-header