Health | Dataviz | Race & Equity
THE COLOR OF
CORONAVIRUS:
2020 year in review
by ANDI EGBERT & KRISTINE LIAO
Dec. 21, 2020
It was hard to imagine how something so small would unleash such massive changes to our society.
Over the course of the year, COVID-19 has decimated cities, devastated families, shuttered stores, evaporated jobs, tore through towns, cancelled weddings, sidelined performers, depleted health care workers, upended schools, ambushed nursing homes, pounced upon prisoners, emptied cupboards, filled hospitals and overrun morgues.
It has made most of us cover our faces. It has made many of us cover our eyes, weeping with grief. It has stolen all of the future birthdays from more than 315,000 Americans (a figure that will likely exceed 350,000 before the 2020 calendar ends).
Since April, the APM Research Lab’s Color of Coronavirus project has documented these lives lost to COVID-19 by racial and ethnic group, and revealed the stark inequities in the likelihood of dying. Explore the lives we’ve lost by state below.
Americans of all backgrounds became the statistics that drew a mountain of rising mortality on our graphs. From June through December, all groups saw their death rates double, triple or more. However, month after month, Black and Indigenous people continued to suffer the highest rates of loss, with more than 1 in 800 lives stolen by early December.
In some places, the year-end mortality toll was almost incomprehensible. Like the more than 1 in 470 Black residents who were lost in Michigan and New Jersey. Or the 1 in 410 Latinos whose lives expired in New York. Or the 1 in 300 Indigenous residents who perished in New Mexico. Or the 1 in 200 Pacific Islanders—largely Marshall Islanders—who died in Arkansas. Or the unthinkable toll of 1 in 140 Indigenous residents stolen from Mississippi.
In 17 states, more than 1 in 1,000 Black residents has died. The same is true for Indigenous residents in 13 states, Whites in eight states, Latinos in five states, Pacific Islanders in three states, and Asians in one state: New York.
The deadliest season so far has varied by group. For Asians, Blacks and Latinos, more lives were lost in the late summer than any other time, while for Pacific Islanders, it was early fall. Indigenous and White Americans have suffered the most new deaths in the last four weeks for which we have data.
Adjusted for age differences across the groups, all populations of color experienced higher nationwide death rates in 2020 than White Americans—with Indigenous, Black and Latino Americans at least 2.7 times more likely to die than their White neighbors. Pacific Islanders were also 2.3 times more likely to die, while Asians experienced just a slight mortality advantage over Whites.
The virus both revealed and amplified the structural racism reflected across our society—the uneven racial patterning around who has safer jobs, paid sick days, uncrowded homes, private transportation, health care access, resources to weather a job loss, neighborhoods that promote health, child care supports and more.
The new year brings the hope of vaccines snuffing out this viral menace, and somewhere on the horizon, the resuming of activities, gatherings and hugs. But for all who have lost loved ones, there will be no returning to “normal.” Neither will the health care workers forget those who they could not save.
More than 1 million people have viewed our Color of Coronavirus page since it launched, as we’ve carefully catalogued the lives taken by COVID-19. Thanks to all of you who have visited and shared about health inequities in the COVID era, so that we may create a more equitable—and healthy—future, for all.