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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have quietly revised their estimates regarding the disproportionately fatal toll Covid-19 places on communities of color, now reflecting a much heavier burden than previously recognized.
The nation’s leading health agency revised the analysis after Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Called on the CDC to adjust the data by age. In a November letter to CDC director Dr Robert Redfield, Warren said: “By failing to adjust COVID-19 death rates by age in its public data releases, the CDC may not provide an accurate assessment of the increased risk of death and serious illness. for communities of color compared to white Americans of the same age. “
CNBC first obtained and reported Warren’s letter to Redfield.
After adjusting for age, which is a standard way to measure the impact of the disease, Hispanics and black Americans are dying at a rate almost three times that of white Americans, according to the CDC. The agency had previously said Hispanics and black Americans are dying at a rate of about one and two times that of Caucasians, respectively.
The updated analysis also shows that Native American Indians or Alaska Natives died at a rate 2.6 times that of White Americans. The CDC previously put that figure at 1.4 times higher than white Americans.
The CDC’s previous infographic, which downplayed the disproportionate burden on communities of color, was shared widely, including in the agency’s “Framework for an Equitable Allocation of the COVID-19 Vaccine”. The CDC appears to have updated the analysis on November 30.
CDC officials did not return CNBC’s request for comment.
“I am pleased that the CDC has responded to my request and adjusted its official COVID-19 race / ethnicity death rates based on age,” Warren said in a statement to CNBC. “This is a critical update that can help us better understand the true effect of COVID-19 on communities across the country and begin to address the systemic inequity that exists in our system. health care.
Adjusting for age has such an impact on the analysis because “people of color are, on average, significantly younger than non-Hispanic white Americans,” as Warren put it in his letter to Redfield. Older people are more likely to die from Covid than younger people.
Disregarding age, Warren said the CDC “hasn’t told the whole story.”
“The fact that the average age of communities of color is much younger than that of non-Hispanic white Americans makes the disproportionate number of deaths among communities of color all the more concerning,” she wrote to Redfield. “To date, the CDC has not systematically articulated the risks and has not provided complete and complete information on the degree of interaction between age and race or ethnicity to inflate the risk of COVID-19 mortality for communities of color.
Former Baltimore Health Commissioner Dr Leana Wen praised Warren and other advocates who pushed the CDC to make the change. She also praised the agency for revising the analysis, even though it came so late in the pandemic. Wen, an emergency physician and professor of public health at George Washington University, added that regardless of age, it’s like “comparing apples to oranges.”
There are underlying factors in society that cause a disproportionate impact on people of color, Wen said on Friday.
“I hope people will see that it is not the virus that discriminates,” she said in a telephone interview. “These are our systems.”
She explained that people of color are more likely to have jobs that see them as essential workers, for example, which increases their risk of exposure to the virus. She also said people of color are more likely to live in multi-generational housing, which could allow the virus to spread more easily from younger people to older people.
And black Americans, Wen said, are more likely to live in “food deserts” than white Americans, leading to all kinds of health issues that increase vulnerability to the virus.
“It is important for us to understand why Covid-19 exposed and unmasked these underlying disparities,” she said. “There are things to do in the short term. For example, targeting testing on hardest hit areas, ensuring resources, including vaccines, are targeted to those same communities, as well as in the longer term, committing to work on social determinants of health. “
Dr Thomas Tsai, a surgeon and health policy researcher at Harvard University, praised the CDC for releasing the new age-adjusted analysis. He said the raw analysis and the news should be released, as both are useful for researchers.
Tsai added that he was concerned that the same disparities that have been evident so far in the pandemic are also evident in the distribution of a vaccine.
“We need to ensure that our forecasting and policy planning models, both for testing and for vaccine delivery, do not run the risk of perpetuating existing structural inequalities in our health system,” he said. declared in a telephone interview. . “You don’t want to under-attribute vaccines to black and Hispanic populations.”
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