Improved measurement of racial/ethnic disparities in COVID-19 mortality in the United States
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Abstract
Different estimation methods produce diverging accounts of racial/ethnic disparities in COVID-19 mortality in the United States. The CDC’s decision to present the racial/ethnic distribution of COVID-19 deaths at the state level alongside re-weighted racial/ethnic population distributions—in effect, a geographic adjustment—makes it seem that Whites have the highest death rates. Age adjustment procedures used by others, including the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, lead to the opposite conclusion that Blacks and Hispanics are dying from COVID-19 at higher rates than Whites. In this paper, we use indirect standardization methods to adjust per-capita death rates for both age and geography simultaneously, avoiding the one-sided adjustment procedures currently in use. Using CDC data, we find age-and-place-adjusted COVID-19 death rates are 80% higher for Blacks and more than 50% higher for Hispanics, relative to Whites, on a national level, while there is almost no disparity for Asians. State-specific estimates show wide variation in mortality disparities. Comparison with non-epidemic mortality reveals potential roles for pre-existing health disparities and differential rates of infection and care.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.21.20109116: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransp…SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.21.20109116: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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