Study shows COVID-19 toll on Latinos vs. whites

On Nov. 15, a doctor at Kaiser Permanente Downey Medical Center in Los Angeles called Jose Andrade to tell him his father’s battle with COVID-19 was coming to an end.

Andrade rushed to the hospital but didn’t make it. By 2 p.m., Arturo Andrade had died.

Jose stood in the hospital room weeping and held Arturo’s hand.

“You’ll be very missed,” he told his dad.

Arturo Andrade, 81, an immigrant from Mexico, made his home in East LA, retired as a school cafeteria worker and sent money back to San Domingo to support family members.

The “gentle” listener, who suffered from kidney and heart disease, was among the staggering number of Latinos in California who died of COVID-19 last year.

Latino people in the state were two to eight times more likely to die of COVID-19 than non-Hispanic white people, according to a study from the University of California, Los Angeles that examined the toll from summer through late January.

People of color have disproportionately suffered from COVID-19. In California, Hispanic or Latino people make up 39% of the population but 46% of deaths and more than half of all cases, the state reported.

“Latinos are overrepresented in many essential worker categories, from farmworkers who provide California’s food to construction workers who build the state’s houses,” the study’s authors wrote, urging the state to prioritize vaccinations and medical care.

The UCLA study found Latinos age 80 and older were more than twice as likely to die as white people.

That disparity deepened when researchers analyzed younger groups. Latinos ages 65 to 79 died at more than four times the rate of white people; ages 50 to 64, nearly six times; and ages 35 to 49, seven to eight times.

“What was astounding was that in every age group, the Latino death rate was multiple times higher than white – multiple,” said David Hayes-Bautista, UCLA professor of public health and medicine and lead author of the study.

An analysis of death certificate data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that after American Indians, Hispanic people were second most likely to die of COVID-19, followed by Black people. High death rates among Latinos are seen in states with large Hispanic populations, including Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Epidemiologist Myriam Torres, director of the University of South Carolina’s Consortium for Latino Immigration Studies, pointed to systemic inequities affecting communities of color, creating vulnerability to the disease, including poor access to health care; comorbidities such as diabetes or obesity, which both disproportionately affect Hispanic people; low-income jobs that make it hard to take time off for a vaccine or coronavirus test.