While still lower than most groups, COVID-19 deaths among White Americans have increased faster over the past 3 Years

Photo by Davide Ragusa on Unsplash.

by CRAIG HELMSTETTER | May 19, 2022

The U.S. has just marked 1 million deaths due to COVID-19. As is now widely known, thanks in part to our own on-going Color of Coronavirus project, the pandemic has been particularly destructive for many communities of color in the U.S.

Early on in the pandemic the pattern of deaths quickly became the latest manifestation of racial and ethnic health disparities, with Black, Indigenous and other people of color dying at much higher rates than White and Asian Americans.

The speedy development of the COVID-19 vaccine less than a year after the first U.S. death brought a sign of hope. But many also feared that the protections of the vaccine would not be equitably available to all racial and ethnic groups, further reinforcing health disparities.

Indeed our early efforts to track vaccine distribution by race and ethnicity showed those concerns to be warranted. Although Indigenous Americans were among the first to get vaccinated in high numbers in some states, other populations of color lagged behind.

Meanwhile, another dynamic was also at play. Even though the COVID-19 vaccine was arguably among the Trump administration’s most notable achievements, then-President Trump often downplayed the pandemic and many of the precautions advocated by public health officials.

During a presidential debate, for example, Trump ridiculed Joe Biden’s stance on masking, stating, “When needed I wear a mask. I don’t wear a mask like him [Biden]. Every time you see him he’s got a mask on. He could be speaking 200 feet away and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”

This sort of stance was embraced by many on the right, and—at least for some—grew to include an opposition to pursuing COVID-19 vaccination. According to the latest KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor survey, for example, 37% of Republicans say they “definitely won’t” get vaccinated, compared with 15% of Independents and 3% of Democrats.

A vast majority of Republicans are White, so it is perhaps not surprising that the same survey indicates that 19% of Whites say they “definitely won’t” get vaccinated, compared with 12% of Black Americans and 10% of Latinos.

Given that CDC data has consistently shown COVID-19 death rates to be higher among the unvaccinated than the vaccinated—10 times more likely as recently as February 2022—the logical question is whether anti-vax sentiments among predominantly White conservatives have led to a higher death rate among White Americans as the pandemic has progressed.

The short answer is yes. What’s more, the data show that racial and ethnic gaps in COVID-19 death rates between White and BIPOC Americans are closing, but that disparities remain.

The first evidence for this is that while roughly 60% of the U.S. population is non-Hispanic White, the percentage of COVID-19 deaths that have occurred among non-Hispanic Whites has grown from 61% in 2020 to 71% so far in 2022.

Looking at these percentages alone would make it seem as though the pandemic has changed from one that had disproportionally higher death rates among Black and Indigenous populations in 2020 to a situation where deaths are disproportionally high among Whites in 2022.

This is a bit misleading, however, since on average the non-Hispanic White population is much older than BIPOC groups, and COVID-19 deaths are way more common among older adults. Thus, to make more apples-to-apples comparisons, public health researchers often “age adjust” death rates between groups.

Looking at the age-adjusted COVID-19 mortality rates by year presents a similar, but less dramatic picture: In 2020, Whites, along with Asian Americans, had far lower COVID-19 death rates than did Indigenous, Latino, Pacific Islander or Black Americans. That racial gap in mortality rates declined somewhat in 2021, and so further still in the first part of 2022—largely due to increasing rates among Whites.

For example, on an age-adjusted basis Indigenous Americans were 2.6 times as likely to die from COVID-19 than were White Americans in 2020. In 2021 this ratio shrank to 2.1, and so far in 2021 Indigenous Americans are 1.7 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than are White Americans.

Similarly, the ratio between Latino and White death rates fell from 2.3 in 2020 to 1.7 in 2021 and 1.3 so far in 2022. And the Black-White ratio fell from 2.1 to 1.5 to 1.4. Even in 2022, these are still notable disparities. But the gaps did close somewhat, largely because death rates among Whites grew toward the higher rates of BIPOC groups.

One final way to compare the age-adjusted death rates: If you divide them by the months that the pandemic was active in each of the above years, 10 months in 2020, all 12 in 2021, and 3.3 (so far the CDC data includes preliminary data from January through early April) in 2022, the average monthly death rate consistently grows only among non-Hispanic White Americans; it falls for every other group.*

A recent CDC study observing these same patterns concluded that “[r]eductions in disparities in [age-adjusted death rates] for most racial and ethnic groups reflect the widespread impact of effective interventions, including vaccination, deployed since January 2020 to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe COVID-19 disease and death.”

Indeed, were it not for vaccinations and other public health interventions, many of which were targeted to serve BIPOC communities, death rates may have increased among communities of color as they have for White Americans.

A final note: While racial and ethnic disparities have closed somewhat, they have not been erased. Even while COVID-19 death rates have increased among White Americans, the persistently higher COVID-19 death rates among many communities of color suggest that progress remains to be made on equitable access to safe working conditions, healthy living arrangements, and access to high-quality health care.

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* The average monthly age-adjusted COVID-19 mortality rates for 2020, 2021 and 2022 are as follows: Indigenous 17.6, 15.6, 14.5; Latino 15.6, 12.9, 11.2; Pacific Islander 11.2, 16.0, 11.9; Black 14.2, 11.3, 11.8; White 6.7, 7.6, 8.6; Asian 6.3, 5.2, 4.9.