Sample quote For black people in the U.S., the death rate of COVID-19 is staggeringly high, compared with the population share.
As the AMP report notes, collectively, black Americans make up 13% of the population in all U.S. areas that released COVID-19 mortality data, but they account for 25% of the deaths.
“In other words, they are dying of the virus at a rate of roughly double their population share, among all American deaths where race and ethnicity is known.”
By comparison, “Across all 41 reporting jurisdictions combined, whites are considerably less likely to die from COVID-19 than expected, given their share of the population. They represent 61.7% of the combined population, but have experienced 49.7% of deaths in America where race and ethnicity is known.”
Echoing the Yale study, the AMP report found huge disparities in individual states. These disparities are much broader than the 2.4-times higher rate of mortality among black Americans, compared with white Americans.
For example, “In Kansas, black residents are 7 times more likely to have died than white residents, while in Washington, D.C., the rate among blacks is 6 times as high as it is for whites. In Missouri and Wisconsin, it is 5 times greater.”
The authors of the AMP report also deplored the mishandling of this crisis by the U.S. federal government, in terms of the gathering and disseminating of data on race.
Andi Egbert, a senior researcher at APM Research Lab, said, “I won’t speculate about motive, but I can’t believe in a modern economy that we don’t have a mandated, uniform way of reporting the data across states.”
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Edit: hard numbers from recent Medicare hospitalizations confirm above estimations
