The Connecticut watchdog agency tasked with enforcing the state’s anti-discrimination laws on Monday will lay out the role segregation is playing to disproportionately kill Black and Latino residents during the pandemic.

“Connecticut is one of the most racially segregated states in the nation,” is how the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities begins its 51-page report. “Segregation born of zoning policies has had a particularly deadly effect during the COVID-19 pandemic. … The effects of segregation cannot only be measured in municipal demographics or statistics of income inequality, but in lives lost.”

The impact of segregation was especially troublesome during the pandemic, the authors write, because the same minorities who live in segregated areas and work in jobs, such as grocery stores and nursing homes, they couldn’t perform from home were disproportionately impacted by COVID itself. Black residents in Connecticut have a death rate from COVID-19 that is more than twice that of white residents, while the death rate for Hispanics is nearly 2 times that of whites, according to state data.

CT’s civil rights enforcement agency: segregation has ‘particularly deadly effect’ amid pandemic, Jacqueline Rabe Thomas, CT Mirror, May 24, 2021, available here