This is an opinion column.

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” — Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Maybe because the new enemy is unseen.

While seen enemies lurk just outside the front door. Or make themselves at home.

Enemies like poverty. Like hunger. Like shamefully inadequate healthcare. Like health disparities and conditions that should make all of us cringe. Like crime. Like distrust.

Lifelong enemies. Generational enemies.

Unlike this new, unseen enemy: COVID-19.

Maybe that’s why not everyone in Birmingham and other parts of Jefferson County seems to be listening. Why some—way too many—are still not heeding the loud, dire warnings to practice social distancing, limit gatherings to very small groups, and most dire, stay at home unless you’re doing something deemed “essential” by health officials.

Why some are still treating this strange new Bizarro World—“home” school and remote work, or, sadly, for increasingly more each day, no work at all—as a corona-cation. Pull out the grill, grab the family, friends, and neighbors, and let’s chill outside like it’s July Fourth!

Except it’s not. Dangerously not. And those gatherings—just being real here—could kill someone.

The obliviousness happens on both sides of the mountain. In parks, around lakes, anywhere folks can congregate and these beautiful, and visibly harmless, spring days.

My gravest concern, though, is for our neighbors in our poorest neighborhoods. In our public housing communities.

Places without Chromebooks or closets crammed with hoarded toilet paper and hand sanitizer.

Places without countless livestream services or a kitchen stuffed with enough food for a week.

Places without multiple floors from which to social distance.

Places often without sidewalks, for goodness sakes.

Places where this coronavirus crisis—this unseen enemy—pales in shadows of the crisis of life.

Places where for too long residents have had limited-to-no access to the kind of quality healthcare most of the rest of us enjoy. Places too long neglected by those with the power to affect change. In chronic illnesses. In infant mortality.

Those with the power to care.

“A crisis reveals preexisting flaws,” Dr. Selwyn Vickers, senior vice president of medicine at UAB and dean of the UAB School of medicine, told me. “When you ignore those parts of your world that suffer the most, it eventually comes back and affects you.”

On Tuesday, the Alabama Department of Public Health finally revealed the grim results of our own longstanding disparities. African Americas represent 27 percent of the population statewide. However, of 2,007 confirmed cases of novel coronavirus in the state, 36.6 are African American (almost half are white).

Among deaths the news is worse: 43.6 percent (17 people) of the 39 Alabamians who’ve been verified to have died due to coronavirus were black, the exact same numbers as whites.

Mobile and Jefferson counties maintain their own data. On Monday, Mobile reported 71 of 128 coronavirus cases were African American—a staggering 55%. Blacks make up just 33% of the county’s population. Its data also revealed the two most frequent underlying conditions among those who’ve died from COVID-19 were diabetes and cardiovascular disease, ailments that overwhelmingly affect African Americans.

Jefferson County has yet to provide its demographic data. It should release it. Now.

Given what we are seeing enough from other parts of the country, those results, too, will likely confirm that COVID-19—the invisible enemy—is pounding African Americans harder than others.

Much harder. Mike Tyson harder.

Last Saturday, Dr. Vickers revealed these disheartening stats during an informative virtual town hall hosted by the Housing Authority Birmingham District: In Milwaukee, a city where 25% of the population is African American, 50% of those testing positive for COVID-19 are African American, and a stunning 80% of those who’ve died from it were black; in Michigan, with a black population of 14%, blacks comprise 35% of those testing positive and 40% of deaths.

On Monday, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot shared that 50% of COVID-19 cases are African American, 72% of deaths. Just 30% of the city’s residents are African American.

I am not surprised.

Neither is Dr. Vickers. “Not at all,” he shared. “Those cities are characterized by large high-rise areas where people can’t help but interact. Like being on a cruise ship in the city.”

Or living in a public housing community.

There are nearly 10,000 public housing and Section 8 families in the Birmingham metro area, about 30,000 people.

The 14 HABD communities are home to 5,000 families; 94 percent of the residents are African American. Scores more live in similar communities in cities throughout Jefferson County.

Officials and health authorities are concerned, rightly so, that those communities might be living, breathing Petri dishes unknowingly incubating COVID-19.

“I worry,” adds Dr. Vickers. “There’s no evidence African Americans, Latinos or poor white people are any less susceptible than anyone living over the mountain. But the nature of public housing, its density, puts them at risk. Physical separation is not as easy to do. Testing in those areas is not done as well, either.”

“Most of our residents live in close quarters, that is concerning to me,” says Cardell Davis, chair of HABD’s Board of Commissioners. “We’re trying to use every tool in the toolbox to let residents know the full seriousness of COVID-19."

Among the tools are “hundreds” of calls daily to residents to screen for symptoms or other medical issues, prolific notices on social media, text message alerts (although only 60 residents have signed up for it), mailings and yard signs reminding residents to wash their hands regularly, practice social distancing and avoid all-but-small groups.

A HABD spokesperson said the agency “is not aware” that any resident has tested positive, though there are protocols in place should it (all but inevitably) happen.

And it will. Especially if residents—justifiably concerned about the everyday enemies in their lives—don’t better respect this invisible enemy, too.

During our chat, Dr. Vickers evoked the words of Rev. Martin Luther King, pulled from the historic Letter from Birmingham Jail:

“In a real sense, all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

“What Dr. King said is so true, we are inextricably linked,” Dr. Vickers said. “If the most vulnerable communities in our state become true hotspots for this crisis, it usually dictates the direction for our state. Look at New Orleans, New York, Detroit, and others. To ignore certain populations—the rural and urban poor with limited access to healthcare and suffering their effects—affects you.”

It also defines you.

The column was updated Tuesday with demographics from the Alabama Department of Public Health.

A voice for what’s right and wrong in Birmingham, Alabama (and beyond), Roy’s column appears in The Birmingham News and AL.com, as well as in the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register. Reach him at rjohnson@al.com and follow him at twitter.com/roysj