#Racism is just as deadly if not worse than COVID-19 for black people: study

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EMS medics transport a man with possible COVID-19 symptoms to the hospital on Aug. 7 in Austin, Texas.
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The coronavirus pandemic is just one more thing to worry about for black Americans.

While the spread of COVID-19 is currently one of the top threats to global mortality, racial inequality remains a leading cause of death for black people in the United States — on par with or greater than the pandemic health threat, according to a new study.

Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, the research compares data on deaths related to COVID-19 — tracked through July 29 — with historical black mortality rates.

“US white deaths including COVID are still well below the best that black mortality has ever been,” said lead study author Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a professor in the University of Minnesota. In an email to CNN, the sociologist explained her conclusion by comparing the lowest ever recorded death rate among black people, set in 2014, with the current mortality of white people, including pandemic data.

“In 2014, the year of the lowest black mortality ever recorded, age-adjusted black mortality was about 1,061 per 100,000,” she said. “In 2017 (the most recent year with final death estimates), US white age-adjusted mortality was 899 deaths per 100,000.” More specifically, Wrigley-Field added, “white COVID-19 age-adjusted mortality is currently about 28 deaths per 100,000.”

Her calculations suggest that 400,000 more white people would have to die in 2020 to match even the lowest historical death toll for one year among black people — already about 5.7 times the confirmed death rates from COVID-19 in whites as of July 29.

“And unless 2020 sees 700,000 to 1 million excess white deaths — a 31% to 46% mortality increase from recent years — life expectancy for whites, even amid COVID-19, will remain higher than it has ever been for blacks,” Wrigley-Field wrote in her report.

“In reality, COVID-19 deaths themselves are highly disproportionately experienced by black Americans and will almost certainly further widen the racial mortality gap,” she added.