Latinos, Blacks hit the hardest

New CDC data shows clear racial inequities in U.S. infection rates

Teresa and Marvin Bradley can’t say for sure how they got the coronavirus. Maybe Teresa Bradley, a Michigan nurse, brought it from her hospital. Maybe it came from a visiting relative. Maybe it was something else entirely.

What is certain — according to new federal data that provides the most comprehensive look to date on nearly 1.5 million coronavirus patients in America — is that the Bradleys are not outliers.

Racial disparities in who contracts the virus have played out in big cities like Milwaukee and New York, but also in smaller metropolitan areas like Grand Rapids, Mich., where the Bradleys live. Those inequities became painfully apparent when Teresa Bradley, who is Black, was wheeled through the emergency room.

“Everybody in there was African-American,” she said. “Everybody was.”

Early numbers had shown that Black and Latino people were being harmed by the virus at higher rates. But the new federal data — made available after The New York Times sued the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

— reveals a clearer and more complete picture: Black and Latino people have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus in a widespread manner that spans the country, throughout hundreds of counties in urban, suburban and rural areas, and across all age groups.

Latino and African American residents of the United States have been three times as likely to become infected as their white neighbors, according to the new data, which provides detailed characteristics of 640,000 infections detected in nearly 1,000 U.S. counties. And Black and Latino people have been nearly twice as likely to die from the virus as white people, the data shows.

The disparities persist across state lines and regions. They exist in rural towns on the Great Plains, in suburban counties, like Fairfax County, Virginia, and in many of the country’s biggest cities.

“Systemic racism doesn’t just evidence itself in the criminal justice system,” said Quinton Lucas, who is the third Black mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, which is in a state where 40% of those infected are Black or Latino even though those groups make up just 16% of the state’s population. “It’s something that we’re seeing taking lives in not just urban America, but rural America, and all types of parts where, frankly, people deserve an equal opportunity to live — to get health care, to get testing, to get tracing.”

Suburban infections

For the Bradleys, both in their early 60s, the symptoms didn’t seem like much at first. A tickle at the back of the throat.

But soon came fevers and trouble breathing, and when the pair went to the hospital, they were separated. Teresa Bradley was admitted while Marvin Bradley was sent home. He said he felt too sick to leave, but that he had no choice. When he got home, he felt alone and uncertain about how to treat the illness.

It took weeks, but eventually they both recovered. When Marvin Bradley returned to work in the engineering department of a factory several weeks later, a white co-worker told Marvin Bradley that he was the only person he knew who contracted the virus.

By contrast, Marvin Bradley said he knew quite a few people who had gotten sick. A few of them have died.

“We’re most vulnerable to this thing,” Marvin Bradley said.

In Kent County, which includes Grand Rapids and its suburbs, Black and Latino residents account for 63% of infections, though they make up just 20% of the county’s population. Public health officials and elected leaders in Michigan said there was no clear reason Black and Latino people in Kent County were even more adversely affected than in other parts of the country.

Among the 249 counties with at least 5,000 Black residents for which The Times obtained detailed data, the infection rate for African American residents is higher than the rate for white residents in all but 14 of those counties. Similarly, for the 206 counties with at least 5,000 Latino residents analyzed by The Times, 178 have higher infection rates for Latino residents than for white residents.

“Have to keep working”

Latino people have also been infected at a jarringly disparate rate compared with white people. One of the most alarming hot spots is also one of the wealthiest: Fairfax County, just outside of Washington, D.C.

Three times as many white people live there as Latinos. Yet through the end of May, four times as many Latino residents had tested positive for the virus, according to the CDC data.

With the median household income in Fairfax twice the national average of about $60,000, housing is expensive, leaving those with modest incomes piling into apartments, where social distancing is an impossibility. In 2017, it took an annual income of almost $64,000 to afford a typical one-bedroom apartment, according to county data. And many have had to keep commuting to jobs.

The risks are borne out by demographic data. Across the country, 43% of Black and Latino workers are employed in service or production jobs that for the most part cannot be done remotely, census data from 2018 shows. Only about 1 in 4 white workers held such jobs.

Also, Latino people are twice as likely to reside in a crowded dwelling — less than 500 square feet per person — as white people, according to the American Housing Survey.

The national figures for infections and deaths from the virus understate the disparity to a certain extent, since the virus is far more prevalent among older Americans, who are disproportionately white compared with younger Americans. When comparing infections and deaths just within groups who are around the same ages, the disparities are even more extreme.

Latino people between the ages of 40 and 59 have been infected at five times the rate of white people in the same age group, the new CDC data shows. The differences are even more stark when it comes to deaths: Of Latino people who died, more than a quarter were younger than 60. Among white people who died, only 6% were that young.

Jarvis Chen, a researcher and lecturer at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that the wide racial and ethnic disparities found in suburban and exurban areas as revealed in the new CDC data should not come as a surprise.

The discrepancies in how people of different races, ethnicities and socioeconomic statuses live and work may be even more pronounced outside of urban centers than they are in big cities, Chen said.

More cases, more deaths

The higher rate in deaths from the virus among Black and Latino people has been explained, in part, by a higher prevalence of underlying health problems, including diabetes and obesity. But the new CDC data reveal a significant imbalance in the number of virus cases, not just deaths — a fact that scientists say underscores inequities unrelated to other health issues.

The focus on comorbidities “makes me angry, because this really is about who still has to leave their home to work, who has to leave a crowded apartment, get on crowded transport, and go to a crowded workplace, and we just haven’t acknowledged that those of us who have the privilege of continuing to work from our homes aren’t facing those risks,” said Dr. Mary Bassett, the director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.

In June, CDC officials estimated that the true tally of virus cases was 10 times the number of reported cases.

They said they could not determine whether these unreported cases had racial and ethnic disparities similar to those seen in the reported infections.