After years of decline, there has been an increase in Black applicants to medical schools, largely in part because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to reports.  

COVID-19’s impact on the Black community has been devastating. 

According to the CDC, Black people are almost three times more likely to be hospitalized by the disease and almost twice as likely to die from coronavirus than white people.  

Medical schools have seen an up to 43 percent surge in Black applicants, according to NBC News. Only 5 percent of doctors in the U.S. are Black.

Howard University’s College of Medicine saw a 28 percent increase in Black applicants; Morehouse’s medical school saw a 26 percent increase; and Texas Tech University Health Science Center School of Medicine saw a 43 percent bump, according to Blavity.  

“We’re now at over 10,800 applications, and we only enroll 130 students,” said Howard University President Wayne A.I. Frederick, Ph.D. said in February, according to Blavity. “We have a crisis in our country and maybe this pandemic created the opportunity for us to change that trend.” 

There has been a slow and steady increase of Black medical school students in the last few decades. 

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, Black people made up 5.6 percent of medical students in 1980; in 2016, Black students made up 7.7 percent of medical school students.  

“I think we can look at our society and what’s happening on the news day-to-day in terms of not only the COVID-19 crisis and how it’s disproportionately impacting our communities of color, but also thinking about the recent social protests and really greater awareness around anti-racism and the importance of really looking at systems change, and that’s true for medicine as well,” The senior director of workforce diversity portfolio at AAMC, Norma Poll-Hunter, Ph.D., told NBC.