US nears 1M deaths from COVID-19
Data show more than 700K people 65 and older died
The count of U.S. deaths from COVID-19 is nearing 1 million, and there’s a wealth of data making clear which groups have been hit the hardest.
More than 700,000 people 65 and older died. Men died at higher rates than women. White people made up most of the deaths overall.
Yet an unequal burden fell on Black, Hispanic and Native American people considering the younger average age of minority communities. Racial gaps narrowed between surges then widened again with each new wave.
Doug Lambrecht was among the first of the nearly 1 million Americans to die from COVID-19. His demographic profile — an older white male with chronic health problems — mirrors the faces of many who would be lost.
The 71-year-old retired physician was recovering from a fall at a nursing home near Seattle when the new coronavirus swept through in early 2020. He died March 1, an early victim in a devastating outbreak that gave a first glimpse of the price older Americans would pay.
With 1 million deaths in sight, Doug’s son Nathan Lambrecht reflected on the toll.
“I’m afraid that as the numbers get bigger, people are going to care less and less,” he said. “I just hope
people who didn’t know them and didn’t have the same sort of loss in their lives due to COVID, I just hope that they don’t forget and they remember to care.”
The pandemic has generated gigabytes of data that make clear which U.S. groups have been hit the hardest.
Elders hit hard
Three out of every four deaths were people 65 and older, according to U.S. data analyzed by The Associated Press.
About 255,000 people 85 and older died; 257,000 were 75 to 84 years old; and about 229,000 were 65 to 74.
“A million things went
wrong and most of them were preventable,” said elder care expert Charlene Harrington of the University of California, San Francisco. Harrington, 80, hopes the lessons of the pandemic lead U.S. health officials to adopt minimum staffing requirements for nursing homes, “then maybe I can retire.”
Spouses left behind
In nearly every 10-year age group, more men have died from COVID-19 than women.
Men have shorter life expectancies than women, so it’s not surprising that the only age group where deaths in women outpaced those in men is the oldest: 85
and older.
For some families who lost breadwinners, economic hardships have added to their grief, said Rima Samman, who coordinates a COVID-19 memorial project that began as a tribute to her brother, Rami, who died in May 2020 at age 40.
“A widow is losing her home, or she’s losing the car she drove the kids to school with, because her husband died,” Samman said. “Little by little, you’re getting pulled down from middle class to lower class.”
Race, ethnicity and age
White people made up 65% of the total deaths, the
largest proportion of any race by far.
This isn’t that surprising because there are more white people in the U.S. than any other race. American Indians, Pacific Islanders and Black people had higher death rates when looking at COVID-19 deaths per capita.
Death rates per capita still leave out a characteristic that is crucial to understanding which groups were disproportionately affected — COVID-19 is more deadly for the elderly.
In the U.S. there are many more elderly white people than elderly people of other races. To evaluate which race has been disproportionately affected, it’s necessary to adjust the per-capita death rate, calculating the rates as if each race had the same age breakdown.
When considering age, it’s apparent that Black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander and Native American people suffered disproportionately more from COVID-19 deaths than other groups in the U.S.
Looking at deaths per capita, Mississippi had the highest rate of any state.
Native Americans experienced higher death rates than all other groups during two waves of the pandemic.
Rural versus urban
The surge that began in late 2020 was particularly rough for rural America.
Americans living in rural areas have been less likely to get vaccinated than city dwellers, more likely to be infected and more likely to die.
“I’ve had multiple people in my ambulance, in their 80s and dying,” said paramedic Mark Kennedy in Nauvoo, Illinois. “Some did die, and when you ask if they’ve been vaccinated, they say, ‘I don’t trust it.’ ”
The recent omicron wave felt even harder to David Schreiner, CEO of Katherine Shaw Bethea Hospital in Dixon, Illinois.
“In the first wave, there were signs throughout the community about our health care heroes . ... People loved us the first time around,” Schreiner said. But by this past winter, people had COVID-19 fatigue.
“Our people have been through so much. And then we would get a patient or a family member who would come to the hospital and refuse to put a mask on,” Schreiner said. “It’s a little bit hard to take.”