“This analysis identified significant differences in the prevalence of Covid-19 across racial / ethnic subgroups of the population in 12 states,” said researchers from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.
In a nearly two-month period from late April to late June, there were 48,788 cumulative Covid-19 hospitalizations in the states that reported race and hospitalization data – Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia and Washington.
“The proportion of White patients’ hospitalizations was substantially smaller vs. their proportion of the population in all 12 states,” the authors found.
The authors found that the opposite was true for Black patients – their percentage of hospitalizations exceeded the percentage of their representative share of state population. This was highest in Ohio, where black patients make up 31.8% of hospitalizations and 13% of the population. Minnesota, Indiana, and Kansas also had particularly high rates of hospitalizations for Black people compared to the general population.
Of the 11 states that reported the number of Covid-19 hospitalizations for Hispanic patients, 10 had hospitalizations for Hispanic patients that were higher than their representative share of the state population. This was most pronounced in Virginia, where Hispanics were 36.2% of the hospital population, compared to 9.6% of the population. Utah and Rhode Island also had high levels of hospitalizations compared to percentage of the population.
Only eight states reported hospital admission data for Native American and Alaskan Native populations, but in some of these states there was a substantial difference. In Arizona, for example, this group makes up 4% of the state’s population but only 15.7% of the hospital population. In Utah, this group accounted for 0.9% of the state’s population, but 5.0% of hospitalizations.
Asian populations were the only group for which the pattern was largely reversed. In 6 of the 10 states that reported data, proportions of hospitalization were lower than population representation. In Massachusetts, for example, the Asian population made up 7% of the population, but only 4% of hospital settings.
These findings, according to the authors, are consistent with data from previous research, and highlight the need for increased data reporting and consistency within and across states. The study has some limitations, including that it is not appropriate for age, gender, underlying conditions, and socioeconomic factors within race / ethnic groups that are likely related to Covid-19 hospitalization.
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