Within the U.S., health disparities stemming from the pandemic have overlapped with an economic recession, a contentious presidential election, and protests over the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and many other Black people by police. In response to Governor Cuomo’s statement, many social scientists and commentators produced evidence-based analysis of early COVID-19 infection and fatality rates-as well as unemployment, poverty statistics, and other health and well-being measures-showing that the virus did not affect everyone equally but was much more impactful for disadvantaged members within society, including people of color, immigrants, people with lower socioeconomic status (SES), and people with disabilities ( Clark et al., 2020 Laster Pirtle, 2020 Yancy, 2020). This statement builds on the reality that COVID-19 could infect anyone, from wealthy celebrities like Tom Hanks to minimum-wage clerks at grocery stores. On March 31, 2020, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo tweeted, “The virus is the great equalizer,” echoing a belief many others had espoused in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic ( Cuomo, 2020). As health disparities continue to emerge from this pandemic, we call on researchers and policy-makers to pay attention to the multiple ways that families matter. Third, many health inequalities driven by racism, sexism, classism, and other oppressive societal force are amplified during COVID-19, but the extent to which this is occurring is shaped by families and by the public policies, organizational decisions, and concurrent events that also impact families and health. Second, how families impact health during the COVID-19 pandemic is conditional on public policies, organizational decisions, and concurrent events. First, risks of specific COVID-19 outcomes and other health problems are unevenly distributed across families. We suggest three primary tenets important for understanding families and health during COVID-19. We theorize that social conditions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic have the potential to increase the importance of families for health and widen existing inequalities.
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