© John Minchillo / Associated Press
Covid-19 is known to be particularly risky for parents. For many minorities, the disease kills them at the prime of their lives.
Among people in the U.S. who have died between their mid-40s and mid-70s since the pandemic began, the virus is responsible for about 9% of deaths. For Latino people who died in that age range, the virus killed nearly 25%, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of death certificate data collected by federal authorities.
The data show how deadly coronavirus deaths affect many minorities, a sharp difference that provides a clear picture of the pandemic’s major impact on vulnerable populations.
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This is especially true for Latino people, in part because their high representation in jobs ranging from health care providers to meat packages makes it harder for them to escape the virus, and because they often have less access to care, according to public health experts.
“Latinos tend to be very, very poorly connected to the formal medical and public health infrastructure,” said David Hayes-Bautista, director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the University of California, the medical school. of Los Angeles. As a consequence, the population has historically been hit hard by communicable diseases, he said.
Data on death certificates are collected by the National Center for Health Statistics, or NCHS, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Death certificates do not track the death of Covid-19 as quickly as the more preliminary state and local reports that feed real-time trackers, such as the Johns Hopkins University dashboard, but the certificates contain demographic details that make the faster data sometimes miss. The Journal analyzed the intersection of both race and age in these data to drill deeper into the impact on different demographic groups, which the NCHS also analyzes more closely.
In early August, the NCHS recorded about 151,000 deaths from Covid-19 by death, compared to 168,700 deaths recently reported by Johns Hopkins.
For the white population of America, death certificate data show the death rate attributed to Covid-19 is slowly increasing with age, and close to the expected trend for a virus that is particularly risky for older people with health complications. This is in part because white people have the highest median age of any racial group.
In contrast, minorities in the US are likely to die younger from Covid-19. Just 3% of white people who die are under 55, but 8% of Asians, 11% of Blacks, 18% of Latinos and 24% of American Indians are under that age . A study by Harvard researchers shows that this increases the toll of the pandemic in the cumulative effect on potential life expectancy, an important measure for public health.
Public health experts are still investigating the reasons for these age differences as the pandemic develops. Many also say they expected minorities to be particularly affected, including at younger ages, because of their overall health profiles and unique access to care.
Low-wage jobs that require work outside the home are considered a prime risk factor for exposure. Cramped living conditions, including multiple generations in one house, and higher dependence on public transit can also increase exposure. Higher rates for some groups of chronic diseases that can complicate Covid-19, such as diabetes, can increase the risk of becoming infected.
“What we do know is that Latinos are over-represented in low-wage jobs, essential farm jobs that work on meat packages to the service sector to restaurants and groceries,” said Jeffrey Reynoso, executive director of the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California .
Even as minorities die younger, death certificates show that people in minority groups die at higher rates of Covid-19 than the white population at almost any age. Among people between the ages of 55 and 64, for example, death rates for minorities are two to five times the white rate.
The higher rates of Covid-19 deaths among minority groups are even harsher as they adjust to the different age profiles of racial groups in the US. This analysis adjusts to the fact that white people are significantly older, and that minorities tend to be younger, for example.
The death certificate data from around the US show a significant increase in deaths above levels that the NCHS has tabled for similar weeks in recent years. These so-called excessive deaths are a measure that epidemiologists use to monitor major events such as the impact of the pandemic. The increase was most pronounced in the week ending April 11, when the 78,700 deaths from all causes were 42% above the typical rate, according to the NCHS.
Deaths have continued to rise since then, though not to the levels seen when the pandemic hit hardest in places like New York City in the spring. Trends in recent weeks are less clear due to the time it takes to gather death certificate information, which is bubbling up to the NCHS of thousands of medical researchers and coroners around the country.
Death certificates from Covid-19 also revealed a sharp distinction between Black and White Americans. Black people accounted for 22% of Covid-19 deaths in early August, although they represented only about 13% of the U.S. population. In contrast, white people represent 60% of the population and just 52% of Covid-19 deaths.
“There were just inequalities in care to begin with that made a bad foundation,” said Denise Brooks-Williams, an executive at the Henry Ford Health System in Michigan. She serves on a state task force Gov. Gretchen Whitmer founded in April to study racial differences and provide advice.
However, these numbers change with the weight of the population data to account for where Covid-19 was actually hit the hardest, which is a method that the CDC has used to zero in on the impact on those places. One effect of the weighted data is that it shows a smaller disproportionate impact among Black people.
The CDC began presenting these adjustments to population data because in the early stages of the pandemic fatal outbreaks hit a small number of places, said Robert Anderson, head of the NCHS mortality statistics branch. This statistical number shrinkage has drawn criticism from some public health experts who say it requires the health and economic vulnerability that outbreaks hit so hard in Black communities in the first place.
“There’s a reason it struck in large numbers in New York, Chicago, LA,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, regarding the virus. “There’s a reason small rural communities are affected later.”
Based on population strength alone, federal data indicate that Latino people have not died in disproportionate numbers. But because the Latino population is on average younger than the rest of the population, adapting to that difference shows that they are dying at disproportionate rates.
This trend has been on clear display in California. Latino people in the state make up about 41.5% of the population between the ages of 35 and 49, for example, but 77% of the deaths for that age group. California Latinos die from Covid-19 in disproportionate numbers, regardless of age.
Latinos in the US otherwise live white and die too often less often, even though they face problems such as greater poverty and less access to health care. This is often described as a paradox, because a poorer socio-economic status often translates into poorer health. For many, the pandemic has fueled that trend.
Write to Jon Kamp at [email protected]
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