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This is Coat Switch from MPR.

I'm Karen Gricksby-Bates.

It's a milestone no one ever wanted to reach, but recently the United States passed the one million mark in COVID deaths.

And that's a conservative estimate.

Many experts believe that number might be considerably higher, the result of undercounting and misdiagnosis.

If COVID has taught us anything in the past two plus years is that racial disparities in healthcare are even more acute than we could have guessed.

During the early days of the pandemic before vaccines became available, poverty and the underlying conditions that accompany it often, diseases like asthma, diabetes and high blood pressure, all made it more likely that COVID patients of color would, as our guest today says, live sicker and die quicker.

Our guest is Linda Villarosa.

She's just published a book under the skin, the hidden toll of racism on American lives and the health of our nation.

Linda knows hospitals as an award-winning health and science reporter.

She's been in and out of them for decades.

Currently, she writes long format stories about the nexus of health and race for the New York Times.

And she comes from a sciencey family.

Her dad, Andres, was a bacteriologist.

Her mom, Clara, a hospital administrator.

So in the late 90s, when Clara Villarosa called from Denver to tell Linda her father was hospitalized,

...