06/16/2020

Fighting COVID-19’s Disproportionate Impact on Black Communities

How more precise data can improve treatment

Though black Americans make up 13 percent of the country's population, they account for 22 percent of the deaths connected to COVID-19, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). We see this disparity—another manifestation of decades of systemic racism and deeply entrenched inequity in America—in individual cities and states across the country. In Chicago, 30 percent of the city's population is black but they have accounted for 45 percent of COVID-19 deaths. In Louisiana, 32 percent of the state's residents are black and they have suffered 53 percent of the COVID-19 deaths.

Public health officials trying to respond to this racial disparity in COVID-19 outcomes may understandably resort to solutions that are as broad and blunt as the available data on the deaths, which typically account for little more than racial background. However, the responses that will be most effective may not be as universal as the problem appears to be for black Americans. The best responses can and should vary from person to person or community to community, according to experts, from the authors of a recent viewpoint in the Journal of the American Medical Association to researchers writing in the July 2019 issue of Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

Yet health officials will be confounded if they go looking for more precise data to facilitate more targeted and effective responses. Granular race, ethnicity, and socio-demographic data related to COVID-19 are needed but not widely available, as Merlin Chowkwanyun, and Adolph L. Reed noted in The New England Journal of Medicine. There is little if any information on the relationship between COVID outcomes and other important demographics, such as socio-economic status.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Stanford Social Innovation Review.