Black people in America have a measurably lower life expectancy than white people [1]. For people born in 2015, it's down to about 5%, but as recently as 1970, it was over 10%. That's a lot of years of life being cut short.
(There are well-known social causes for this which are direct consequences of racism, like access to quality health care, housing, education, credit, etc.)
COVID-19 deaths aren't taking nearly that many years. According to [2] (about 1.5 weeks old), 1 in 1850 (or around 0.05% of) black Americans have died from COVID-19. Even if this continues for the rest of the year, it still can't hold a candle to plain old racism.
Joking aside, you can sometimes prove causality. It's just not as easy as proving a correlation. The most broadly accepted method would be a RCT (randomized controlled trial), though it is often unethical or unfeasible.
You can also build on causal assumption that everyone agrees on. (Like: A person's gender cannot be caused by a government policy. A person winning the lottery is not caused by anything other than playing the lottery.) From such knowledge you can build a causal graph, and (in some cases) draw new causal conclusions from statistical data.
Long story short: you cannot just dismiss a correlation as being useless for any proof of causality.
I sympathize with a lot of these problems, but I wonder if the police issue getting all the attention is going to prevent these other issues from getting serious attention. :|
Their letter has a paragraph addressing some of their concerns:
> White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19. Black people are twice as likely to be killed by police compared to white people, but the effects of racism are far more pervasive. Black people suffer from dramatic health disparities in life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, chronic medical conditions, and outcomes from acute illnesses like myocardial infarction and sepsis. Biological determinants are insufficient to explain these disparities. They result from long-standing systems of oppression and bias which have subjected people of color to discrimination in the healthcare setting, decreased access to medical care and healthy food, unsafe working conditions, mass incarceration, exposure to pollution and noise, and the toxic effects of stress. Black people are also more likely to develop COVID-19. Black people with COVID-19 are diagnosed later in the disease course and have a higher rate of hospitalization, mechanical ventilation, and death. COVID-19 among Black patients is yet another lethal manifestation of white supremacy. In addressing demonstrations against white supremacy, our first statement must be one of unwavering support for those who would dismantle, uproot, or reform racist institutions.
Edit: these aren't the calculations you asked for, but should give you an indication of what they are thinking about.
Yes, unfortunately black people are disproportionately poor, so they bear the brunt of issues associated with a lack of money in America. In the present day, I suspect most things people call systemic racism is rooted in and perpetuated by how disproportionately poor blacks in America are.
(There are well-known social causes for this which are direct consequences of racism, like access to quality health care, housing, education, credit, etc.)
COVID-19 deaths aren't taking nearly that many years. According to [2] (about 1.5 weeks old), 1 in 1850 (or around 0.05% of) black Americans have died from COVID-19. Even if this continues for the rest of the year, it still can't hold a candle to plain old racism.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2017/015.pdf [2]: https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race