The Unequal Burden of the Covid-19 Pandemic: Racial/Ethnic Disparities in US Cause-Specific Mortality

Abstract

This paper documents changes in mortality by race and ethnicity between 2019 and 2020. Using age-standardized death rates, it attributes changes for Black, Hispanic, and White populations to various underlying causes of death and shows how these racial and ethnic patterns vary by age and sex. Hispanic individuals had the largest increase in mortality attributed to Covid-19, but Black individuals had the largest increase in all-cause mortality. Exceptionally large increases in mortality from heart disease, diabetes, and external causes of death account for the adverse trend in all-cause mortality within the Black population. For the Black and White populations, percentage increases in all-cause mortality were similar for men and women and for ages 25-64 and 65+. Among the Hispanic population, however, percentage increases in mortality were greatest for working-aged men. Results are very similar when 2020 death rates are compared to those in 2019 and when they are compared to projected 2020 rates based on a time series extrapolation of death rates from 2015 to 2019.

Reductions in US life expectancy during the COVID-19 pandemic by race and ethnicity: Is 2021 a repetition of 2020?

“…The difference between our estimates based only on COVID-19 mortality and the NVSS estimates based on allcause mortality were largest for the Black population (1.9 vs. 2.9 years), primarily because a higher proportion of 2020 deaths for the Black population, compared with Whites and Latinos, resulted from increases in non-COVID-19 causes(Arias et al, 2021;Luck et al, 2021). If all-cause mortality patterns are similar to those in 2020, it is likely that the ultimate reduction in 2021 life expectancy will be even larger for the Black population.…”

Mexico’s surge of violence and COVID-19 drive life expectancy losses 2015–2021

“…(21) In the United States, the country with the second highest number of COVID-19-related deaths, life expectancy losses were 1.7 years and 2.2 years for females and males respectively, (21) although with large differences across ethnic groups. (22,23) Moreover, in most European countries, life expectancy at birth in 2021 started recuperating, but levels are still lower than those reported in 2019. (24) Among Latin American countries, few studies have examined life expectancy losses at the subnational level.…”

Mortality Rates by College Degree Before and During COVID-19

“…Comparisons of mortality in 2020 and 2019 are straightforward and transparent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that over the period from late January 2020 to late February 2021, approximately 75%-88% of excess deaths were directly related to COVID-19, Rossen et al (2021), though the fraction is different for different racial and ethnic groups, Luck, Preston, Elo, and Stokes (2021). If we were to interpret the increase from 2019 to 2020 as a measure of excess mortality, we would have a ratio of excess to reported COVID-19 mortality of 1.28 from March to December 2020, consistent with the CDC range and with previous estimates for the year, , Chan, Chen, and Martin (2021).…”

“…Given that the relative mortality rates changed little between the two years, equation (2) implies that the second term on the right-hand side is small or is less important than expected. Luck et al (2021) argue that the opposite is true for changes in mortality by race and ethnicity, and that differences in infection risk-the second term on the right-hand side of (2)-are likely to bear the largest share of blame for the changes in racial patterns of mortality. We again note their finding (confirmed in our data) that among non-Hispanic whites and Blacks under…”