COVID-19 Research on Minorities

There’s a new working paper out. Here’s the facts they want to look at:

• In the U.S., blacks are getting COVID-19 more often than whites
• In the U.S., Hispanics are getting COVID-1 more often than whites
• In the U.S., blacks are dying from COVID-19 more often than whites
• In the U.S., Hispanics are dying from COVID-1 more often than whites

Unlike what you see in the media, they try to explain this using regression analysis and a lot of possible covariates — focusing on ones shown to track racial disparities. They use zip code level data from 6 large metropolitan areas (including New York City, which was hardest hit).

Here’s what they figured out:

• They can explain a lot about cases, and blacks are still more likely to contract COVID-19, and Hispanics are even more likely.
• Even so, a big chunk of the case incidence within a zip code is not related to those racial disparity covariates.
• Differences in deaths are largely explained by differences in cases, rather than racial disparities that might affect treatment.

Sooo … something is going on to transmit the disease in minority communities that we haven’t figured out yet, but once infected race doesn’t seem to matter much. This suggests we need a lot more community outreach among the well.

You can read the whole thing, entitled “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in COVID-19: Evidence from Six Large Cities“.