CLEVELAND, Ohio — Asian residents make up just under 4 percent of the Summit County population, but account for nearly 20 percent of coronavirus cases. That’s nearly 1 in 5 people.

Data from the Summit County Public Health Department reports that as of Tuesday, June 30, of the over 1,900 confirmed and probable cases in the county, 53 percent are white residents, 24 percent are Black residents and 19 percent are Asian residents, with 4 percent identified as “other.

"The North Hill Neighborhood of Akron,” which is located in the 44310 zip code and has a large immigrant population, has the highest number of coronavirus cases in Summit County.

“What we have are a group of individuals who live typically in multi-generational homes, that work in frontline jobs, where they're either in manufacturing, you know, some sort of line work, and then they also get to work, typically their transportation to work is congregate as well,” said Donna Skoda, who is the health commissioner at Summit County Public Health.

Skoda says the Asian residents who live in that area often have jobs that don’t have paid sick leave, which becomes a job security issue if they don’t show up for work. She says this is also true for other minorities living in impoverished areas.

"I think anytime you have any sort of disparity you have to look for underlying causes, and it’s racism,” Skoda said. “Most of the disenfranchised live in segregated areas and that’s just because of policies and building practices and how we’ve built neighborhoods and lack of sidewalks, we’ve put freeways through neighborhoods, we’ve built culdesacs, so we can’t walk anymore on grid-pattern streets. I mean, we’ve done all sorts of things in building and there is impact from those infrastructure policies that have segregated and poor people tend to live together in neighborhoods. We’ve abandoned a lot of our inner city neighborhoods.”

Elaine Tso is the CEO of Asian Services in Action, which seeks to improve the quality of life for Asians in Northeast Ohio. She says the organization provides a range of services to Asian residents, including health and translation services. They, along with the Summit County Health Department, are working to provide necessary information and develop community testing sites.

“We are in ongoing education and outreach programming with the community members,” Tso said. “Many of our staff are from the communities that we're serving and they are reaching out to their communities and sharing, sharing the information about the best practices to prevent infection during this time of COVID.”

At the same time, the health department is noticing another alarming overall trend. Summit County’s COVID-19 death rate is twice Ohio’s average. Skoda attributes it to the high number of nursing homes and assisted living facilities in the county.

“We’ve had a lot of deaths associated with long-term care,” she said. “And so, when you have that elderly group population, some of those folks had directives in place so that when they became ill they did not want any sort of help or any sort of assistance or medical treatment, but also the disease was far more difficult to recover from in the elderly and they had a lot of complicating conditions.”

Summit County’s coronavirus death rate is at 10.49 percent — considerably higher than the state’s rate of 5.53 percent. Skoda says she thinks the number is skewed since most serious individuals are being tested and subsequently dying.

“I think as we see more folks and we get more testing and the denominator gets bigger, we’ll see our death rate come down. We’re doing some community testing, we’re looking at additional, so yeah, I think it’s getting much better,” Skoda said.