**1. Introduction**

Preliminary racial data on the coronavirus pandemic indicates that African Americans are much more likely to experience infections, hospitalizations, and death from the virus in comparison to other racial groups. Of the 25,152,433 cases of COVID-19 infections and 419,827 deaths due to this infection in the United States as of January 26, 2021 (**Table 1**), the percentage of African Americans (12.2%) and Hispanics (20.8%) experience coronavirus infections (**Table 2**) near their representative percentages in the general population (13.4% and 18.5%, respectively) (**Table 3**). In addition, African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians are among the highest proportion of individuals with laboratory-confirmed COVID-related hospitalizations per 100,000 population (564, 524.2, and 645.7, respectively) compared to whites (261.9) (**Table 4**). Finally, a higher percentage of African Americans (15.6%), specifically and uniquely,

