Here’s a surprising development in the covid-19 battle: Over the past several weeks, the age-adjusted death rate from the virus has been lower for Black people than it has been for whites.
The Washington Post has analyzed the death toll by race, and reports that ever since this past spring, the number of covid deaths per million Black residents was about the same as it was for white residents.
But in September, the Black death rate fell well below the white rate. Covid killed 4.7 of every 1 million Black people, and 6.7 of every 1 million white people.
To be sure, both rates are extremely low. They are comparable only to numbers from July 2021, before the Delta variant of the virus caused a spike in fatalities; and in April of this year, after the Omicron variant caused a similar surge.
Other death rates make evident today’s large decline in the number of deaths. In April 2020, shortly after the virus arrived, the Black death rate peaked at 171 per million — about 40 times higher than today. It has not come close to that level since.
For whites, the April 2020 death peak was 44 per million, which is about seven times higher than today. The largest white death rate was 83 per million in January 2021.
Since April, fortunately, the death rates for all races have remained low. It looks like vaccines and herd immunity have kicked in.
The Post analysis says that at the beginning of the pandemic, minority communities that were more vulnerable to infection but had less protection were more at risk.
“At the start of the pandemic, Black people were more than three times as likely to die of covid as their White peers,” the story reported. “But as 2020 progressed, the death rates narrowed — but not because fewer Black people were dying. White people began dying at increasingly unimaginable numbers, too.”
The Post blamed “an erosion of trust in government and in medicine” for a decline in vaccination rates in 2021, which helped covid variants do more damage. The final three months of 2021 were the first time that the white death rate was higher than the Black rate.
An Ohio State researcher believes that today’s Black death rate is lower than the white rate because more Black people overcame their hesitancy about vaccines. He may have a point: Since the virus arrived, it has not been hard to find white conservatives who say that vaccines and masks infringe upon their liberties.
Another possible factor: University of Georgia researchers found that white people who knew the virus was more deadly among Black people were less fearful of the virus and less supportive of safety measures.
While death rates are still low compared to their peaks, it is interesting to see that the white death rate is at least one-third larger than the rates among both Black residents and Hispanic residents — and fully twice the rate of deaths among Asian residents. That is something to think about as winter approaches.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
