Zion Baptist Church Pastor Brain Herron helps pass out masks to Minneapolis residents during the Covid-19 pandemic. | Jerry Holt/Star Tribune via Getty Images

Black people make up a disproportionate share of confirmed Covid-19 cases in the state, but not deaths.

While people protest the death of a black man at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer and a president with a history of inflaming racial tensions seemingly incites violence against those same protesters, black communities in Minnesota must also endure Covid-19. There, as elsewhere in the United States, the public health and economic crises are taking a harsher toll among minorities than the white majority.

Across the country, black Americans are getting infected with the coronavirus and dying from it at disproportionate rates compared to their share of the population. The Covid-19 mortality rate among black Americans is 2.4 times higher