WATCH: House Ways and Means holds hearing on COVID-19 effects on communities of color

The House Ways and Means committee held a hearing on Wednesday called “The Disproportionate Impact of COVID-19 on Communities of Color.”

Watch the hearing in the player above.

Specific data on coronavirus infection rates remains incomplete, but black and Latino communities have been particularly hard hit. In Chicago, for example, black people make up about 30 percent of the city’s population, but accounted for about 70 percent of its coronavirus deaths in early April.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month showed that African Americans make up approximately 30 percent of cases, despite representing 13 percent of the U.S. population.

In April, a group of Senate and House Democrats sent letters requesting the White House to immediately begin taking steps to track and address these disparities.

“We know that the disparities in our society did not begin with the COVID-19 pandemic, but this crisis has exposed the deep inequality in the health and economic security of our communities,” one of the letters stated.