The COVID-19 pandemic has hit minority groups in the United States hard, with more deaths among Black and Hispanic Americans compared with white and Asian Americans, reports WebMD.
Impact of COVID-19 on minority groups
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has hit minority groups in the United States hard, with significantly more deaths among Black and Hispanic Americans compared with white and Asian Americans, a new study finds.
“Focusing on COVID-19 deaths alone without examining total excess deaths — that is, deaths due to non-COVID-19 causes as well as to COVID-19 — may underestimate the true impact of the pandemic,” said study author Meredith Shiels, senior investigator at the U.S. National Cancer Institute.
The excess deaths that occurred during the pandemic have resulted in growing disparities in overall U.S. death rates, with the gap in age-adjusted all-cause deaths increasing between 2019 and 2020 for Black and American Indian/Alaska Native men and women compared with white men and women.
About the study
For the study, the researchers compared excess deaths by race/ethnicity, sex, age group and cause of death from March to December 2020 with data from the same months in 2019.
The team used provisional death certificate data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Outcome
The findings showed that nearly 3 million people died in the United States between March 1 and Dec. 31, 2020. Compared with the same period in 2019, that totaled 477,200 excess deaths, with 74% of these excess deaths being due to COVID-19.
After taking age into account, the numbers of excess deaths by population size among Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Hispanic men and women were more than double those in white and Asian American men and women, according to the report.
The data do not explain the reasons for the excess non-COVID deaths.
“It is possible that fear of seeking out health care during the pandemic or misattribution of causes of death from COVID-19 are responsible for a majority of the excess non-COVID-19 deaths,” Shiels said in a news release from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
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Source: WebMD
