User:Impactfulmatter/COVID-19 Racial Disparities in the United States/Millager Peer Review

General info

Whose work are you reviewing?

Impactfulmatter

Link to draft you're reviewing

User:Impactfulmatter/COVID-19 Racial Disparities in the United States

Link to the current version of the article (if it exists)

n/a?

Evaluate the drafted changes

Hello Gabrielle -- congrats on getting this draft of the article done. I'll try to give some helpful comments here; take them or leave them, it's all good.

First off, I think your outline has all the important pieces here. I like your breaking down social determinants of health and showing many of the dimensions of disparities experienced by different groups. My main point of constructive criticism is that I think this article needs a good, thorough second-draft pass where you can clean it up a little through adding some more citations and links, keeping all of the tense consistent, and clarifying some points that are not specific -- for example, "racism faced in the midst of everything else" could be more clear in the lead.

Some additional comments:

• Lead
  • I think the lead would be stronger if it jumped right to summarizing the main points and the rest of the article. I would start with a sentence like: The COVID-19 pandemic has had unequal impact on different racial and ethnic groups in the United States, resulting in new disparities of health outcomes as well as exacerbating existing health and economic disparities... and then you can go on to summarize the main sections of the rest of the article.
  • It also feels like the lead needs one or two citations that best summarize racial/ethnic disparities of COVID-19. If you're looking for more sources, the reading assignments for our second "journal article assignment" have a couple of good summary articles for disparities of COVID-19. I read Khazanchi et al. (2020) "Racism, Not Race, Drives Inequity Across the COVID-19 Continuum" and that might be a good source to cite for general statements. It's super short, too.
• Content
  • As mentioned above, I thought the overall content and outline was very strong. Personally I do think the "Xenophobia and Race" section would make sense to at least briefly summarize as a part of a "Racial Disparities" article, even if it was only to reference the bigger article and summarize with just one sentence.
• Tone and Balance
  • You had a good neutral tone throughout., IMO.
  • I felt like the statements are not always made with the same tense (past vs. past perfect vs. present perfect, etc.). I'm not sure what Wikipedia's recommended style is but to me it would make sense to use present perfect tense for most everything related to COVID-19, such that you're saying things like "White people HAVE RECIEVED higher rates of vaccination even though the pandemic HAS disproportionately AFFECTED people of color." I think your article will sound more authoritative, neutral, and consistent if everything is presented in this way, because most everything related to COVID-19 is still ongoing or still being reported.
• Sources and References
  • I like that you have a lot of facts and percentages reported across a number of different statistics. Things like this make writing a full wikipedia article challenging, but you've got a good start here.
  • That said, I think there's room to add a few more sources to the page. As I mentioned above, I recommend checking out the Khazanchi et al (2020) article and some of the others on the "Journal Article Assignment 2" homework page.
• Organization
  • I think the outline for this article makes a lot of sense.
  • You could probably add a bunch more "social determinants of health" but that might go beyond the scope of this assignment. Maybe just a "see also" section where you can link to a bunch of other Wikipedia pages for things like Black Lives Matter, race and health in the United States, etc.
  • Also thinking about "social determinants of health," it might be helpful to separate out "pre-existing health vulnerabilities/disparities" of BIPOC groups compared with "disparities in exposure risk for COVID-19." What i mean here is, there are many things that have long been unequal that increase risk of COVID-19 infection/mortality -- for example, co-morbidities like diabetes -- and also there are many things that specifically increase risk of exposure -- like housing or work situations -- and that these two (related) factors combine to make for a particularly at-risk situation for BIPOC.

I hope this is helpful -- feel free to email me if you have any questions about my comments here or anything else. Have a good week!