COVID-19 mortality rate for white Americans pales in comparison to pre-pandemic Black mortality rates
A new study suggests that even during the pandemic, white mortality will remain lower than the lowest pre-pandemic Black mortality rates.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve heard numerous reports about the disparities of its impact: the disease was hitting frontline and “essential” workers harder than other populations, and minority groups were more likely to suffer complications and death from the virus.
A new study from demographer and sociologist Elizabeth Wrigley-Field writes in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, puts the spotlight on how significant the health impact of racial inequality is in the United States by comparing not only COVID-19-related mortality rates among Black and white Americans, but how those compare to pre-pandemic mortality rates.
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Wrigley-Field, of the University of Minnesota, estimates that it would take an additional 400,000 deaths among white Americans during the pandemic to bring the death rate for that group to a level comparable to the lowest pre-pandemic death rate experienced by Black Americans.
Age-adjusted mortality and life expectancy for Black Americans are equivalent to white rates from, respectively, nearly 20 or 30 years earlier, Wrigley-Field wrote. For COVID-19 to raise mortality as much as racial inequality does, she wrote, it would need to erase two to three decades of mortality progress for whites.
The estimates make it plausible that, even during the pandemic, white mortality will remain lower than the lowest pre-pandemic Black mortality rates in the U.S., according to Wrigley-Field.
Unless 2020 sees 700,000 to 1 million excess white deaths—a 31 to 46% mortality increase from recent years—life expectancy for whites, even amid COVID-19, will remain higher than it has ever been for Blacks, Wrigley-Field writes. The highest-ever black life expectancy, in 2014, is below the level for whites since 1989, she says.
The author notes that efforts to minimize risk from COVID-19 have seen relatively high social consensus, while proposals aimed at minimizing racial disparities, such as by providing reparations, expanding social programs, defunding the police, and altering school assignment mechanisms and zoning laws to combat segregation, remain highly contentious.
“These results should reframe these debates away from which transformations are politically tenable to, simply, which transformations will be effective in preventing harms associated with racism. If Black disadvantage operates every year on the scale of whites’ experience of COVID-19, then so too should the tools we deploy to fight it. Our imagination and social ambition should not be limited by how accustomed the United States is to profound racial inequality,” Wrigley-Field wrote.
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