Now compare that to the breathtaking numbers we are seeing from cities with a black majority or plurality — New Orleans, Milwaukee, Chicago — where black people represent 70 to 80 percent of the deaths, though their percentages of the population don’t come close to that.

Michigan has released data that show a disproportionate impact on black people, but it didn’t break out race data for Detroit, the state’s largest city, which also happens to be majority black. But, as The Detroit Free Press reported Friday, “Combined, Wayne County and the city of Detroit have about half of the entire state’s cases of coronavirus — 47 percent — for a total of at least 5,069 cases.”

California has had much success in controlling the spread and impact of the virus. Partly, that is because the state and its cities took early and strong actions. But it is not lost on me that there isn’t a single majority black city in the state.

At the same time, states with small black populations have fared far better. Washington State, with one of the first outbreaks in this country, hasn’t seen the explosion of cases that New York has seen. There again, black people are only 4 percent of the population in the state.

We urgently need more data. We need to know if what we are seeing in early data from majority-black cities is a pattern or not. Every city, state and the federal government must gather and publicize the data now.