Black and Latino Americans entered the coronavirus crisis with lower incomes and less wealth than whites. In the early months of the outbreak and its recession, they suffered disproportionately high rates of infection and job loss.

Now, as public officials around the country take initial steps to lift restrictions on economic activity, those black and Latino workers will bear a higher share of the health risks in getting back to work.

It is a pick-your-poison fact of a crisis that has exacerbated racial and socioeconomic inequality in the United States: The pandemic has knocked millions of the most economically vulnerable Americans out of work. Rushing to reopen, their employers could offer them a financial lifeline, but at a potentially steep cost to their health.

Americans who earn $50,000 a year or less are more than twice as likely to say they or a family member have lost jobs amid the crisis compared with those who earn more than $150,000, according to national polling data by the digital research firm Civis Analytics. Higher earners and whites are far more likely to say they can work from home during the pandemic than lower earners and black and Latino Americans, according to an April poll for The New York Times by the online research firm SurveyMonkey.

Researchers from the JPMorgan Chase Institute warned this month in a report that the coronavirus recession would hit black and Hispanic families harder in terms of lost income, forcing them to cut back their spending to a greater degree than whites, because black and Hispanic families have fewer savings to fall back on.

“There could be immense and devastating income effects that could be involved with this evolving depression,” said William A. Darity Jr., an economist at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, who is a leading scholar of economic discrimination in the United States. Inequality, he said, “has been horrendous in recent years, and I can only imagine those disparities would get worse.”