CDC Documents Racial Disparities of COVID-19 Illness

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides the federal government's most complete picture of the demographic data of COVID-19 illness.

1 minute read

June 21, 2020, 5:00 AM PDT

By James Brasuell @CasualBrasuell


COVID-19

Emily Geraghty / Shutterstock

"African-Americans and Latinos are vastly overrepresented when it comes to coronavirus infections, according to an analysis released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention," reports Alexander Nazaryan.

The data released on June 15 is the "first from the federal government to fully describe the pandemic’s racial impact," according to Nazaryan. The news is not good for Black and Latino communities. 

"African-Americans account for only 13.4 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Census Bureau, but the CDC says they accounted for 22 percent of coronavirus infections studied in the new analysis," reports Nazaryan.

"Latinos represent 18.3 percent of the population, according to the last census of the American population, conducted a decade ago. But the CDC found that they suffered 33 percent of the coronavirus infections in the cohort covered by the study."

As noted by Nazaryan, much of the available data on coronavirus infections does not include racial data, so an understanding of the demographics of infection is still incomplete.

Wednesday, June 17, 2020 in Yahoo News

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