begin quote from:
The pandemic marks another
grim milestone: 1 in 500
Americans have died of covid-19
At a certain point, it was no longer a matter of if the United States would reach the gruesome milestone of 1 in 500 people dying of covid-19, but a matter of when. A year? Maybe 15 months? The answer: 19 months.
Given the mortality rate from covid and our nation’s population size, “we’re kind of where we predicted we would be with completely uncontrolled spread of infection,” said Jeffrey D. Klausner, clinical professor of medicine, population and public health sciences at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. “Remember at the very beginning, which we don’t hear about anymore, it was all about flatten the curve.”
[CDC: Unvaccinated 11 times more likely to die of covid-19]
The idea, he said, was to prevent “the humanitarian disaster” that occurred in New York City, where ambulance sirens were a constant as hospitals were overwhelmed and mortuaries needed mobile units to handle the additional dead.
The goal of testing, mask-wearing, keeping six feet apart and limiting gatherings was to slow the spread of the highly infectious virus until a vaccine could stamp it out. The vaccines came but not enough people have been immunized, and the triumph of science waned as mass death and disease remain. The result: As the nation’s covid death toll exceeded 663,000 this week, it meant roughly 1 in every 500 Americans had succumbed to the disease caused by the coronavirus.
People older than 85 make up only 2 percent of the population, but a quarter of the total death toll. One in 35 people 85 or older died of covid, compared with 1 in 780 people age 40 to 64.
One death in...
Age 85+
35 people
Higher death rate
Age 65 to 84
150
Age 40 to 64
780
While covid’s death toll overwhelms the imagination, even more stunning is the deadly efficiency with which it has targeted Black, Latino, and American Indian and Alaska Native people in their 30s, 40s and 50s.
Death rates for younger groups, 40 to 64 years old, are much lower, but racial inequities grow larger.
One death in...
Native Americans
Hispanics
Blacks
Asians
Whites
240 people
390
Higher death rate
480
1,300
1,300
Death at a younger age represents more lost years of life. Lost potential. Lost scholarship. Lost mentorship. Lost earnings. Lost love.
Neighborhoods decimated. Families destroyed.
“So often when we think about the majority of the country who have lost people to covid-19, we think about the elders that have been lost, not necessarily younger people,” said Abigail Echo-Hawk, executive vice president at the Seattle Indian Health Board and director of the Urban Indian Health Institute. “Unfortunately, this is not my reality nor that of the Native community. I lost cousins and fathers and tribal leaders. People that were so integral to building up our community, which has already been struggling for centuries against all these things that created the perfect environment for covid-19 to kill us.”
[Covid-19 proves especially lethal to younger Latinos]
Six of Echo-Hawk’s friends and relatives — all under 55 — have died of covid.
“This is trauma. This is generational impact that we must have an intentional focus on. The scars are there,” said Marcella Nunez-Smith, chair of President Biden’s COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force and associate dean for health equity research at Yale University. “We can’t think that we’re going to test and vaccinate our way out of this deep pain and hurt.”
In the younger working-age group, 18 to 39 years old, the racial differences are even greater, with covid killing Blacks and Hispanics more than three times as often as Whites, and Native Americans almost nine times as much.
One death in...
1,800 people
Native Americans
Hispanics
Blacks
Asians
Whites
Higher death rate
4,700
4,900
16,000
16,000
The pandemic has brought into stark relief centuries of entwining social, environmental, economic and political factors that erode the health and shorten the lives of people of color, putting them at higher risk of the chronic conditions that leave immune systems vulnerable to the coronavirus. Many of those same factors fuel the misinformation, mistrust and fear that leave too many unprotected.
Take the suggestion that people talk to their doctor about which symptoms warrant testing or a trip to the hospital as well as the safety of vaccines. Seems simple. It’s not.
Many people don’t have a physician they see regularly due in part to significant provider shortages in communities of color. If they do have a doctor, it can cost too much money for a visit even if insured. There are language barriers for those who don’t speak English fluently and fear of deportation among undocumented immigrants.
[The racial gap in vaccinations]
“Some of the issues at hand are structural issues, things that are built into the fabric of society,” said Enrique W. Neblett Jr., a University of Michigan professor who studies racism and health.
Essential workers who cannot avoid the virus in their jobs because they do not have the luxury of working from home. People living in multigenerational homes with several adult wage-earners, sharing housing because their pay is so low. Even the fight to be counted among the covid casualties — some states and hospitals, Echo-Hawk said, don’t have “even a box to check to say you are American Indian or Alaskan Native.”
It can be difficult to tackle the structural issues influencing the unequal burden of the pandemic while dealing with the day-to-day stress and worry it ignites, which, Neblett said, is why attention must focus on both long-term solutions and “what do we do now? It’s not just that simple as, ‘Oh, you just put on your mask, and we’ll all be good.’ It’s more complicated than that.”
Rates in states and the District
One death in...
330 people
Mississippi
New Jersey
Louisiana
New York
Arizona
Massachusetts
Rhode Island
Alabama
Arkansas
Oklahoma
Connecticut
South Dakota
Florida
Georgia
Indiana
New Mexico
Pennsylvania
South Carolina
Michigan
Nevada
Illinois
North Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Iowa
Delaware
Kansas
Kentucky
Ohio
West Virginia
Missouri
Montana
California
Maryland
District of Columbia
Wyoming
Wisconsin
North Carolina
Virginia
Minnesota
Idaho
Colorado
Nebraska
New Hampshire
Washington
Oregon
Utah
Maine
Alaska
Hawaii
Vermont
330
350
The New York deaths were predominantly recorded in the early months of the pandemic, when the nation's densest area was the first ravaged by the coronavirus. Covid has killed 1 in every 210 people in the Bronx, 1 in every 220 in Queens, and 1 in every 240 in the state's largest county, Brooklyn.
360
380
380
380
390
410
410
420
420
440
440
450
Higher death rate
450
450
450
460
460
470
480
490
490
500
510
510
550
550
550
560
580
590
590
610
660
Although nationally there is no difference in death rates between urban, suburban and rural areas, states with the lowest death rates are mostly sparser areas, such as Vermont and Utah.
680
690
700
710
720
790
820
940
1,100
1,200
1,200
1,400
1,600
2,100
2,100
The exacting toll of the last year and a half — covid’s stranglehold on communities of color and George Floyd’s murder — forced the country to interrogate the genealogy of American racism and its effect on health and well-being.
“This is an instance where we finally named it and talked about structural racism as a contributing factor in ways that we haven’t with other health disorders,” Neblett said.
But the nation’s attention span can be short. Polls show there was a sharp rise in concern about discrimination against Black Americans by police following Floyd’s murder, including among White Americans. That concern has eroded some since 2020, though it does remain higher than years past.
“This mistaken understanding that people have, almost this sort of impatience like, ‘Oh, we see racism. Let’s just fix that,’ that’s the thing that gives me hives,” Nunez-Smith said. “This is about generational investments and fundamental changes in ways of being. We didn’t get here overnight.”
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