Covid especially lethal to younger Latinos

THERMAL, Calif. — Her lungs aching with each breath, Blanca Quintero, a 53-year-old cancer survivor, sought care for the coronavirus from physicians almost two hours away in Mexicali, Mexico, because her calls to doctors here went unanswered.

Was she being overlooked in the flurry of the winter surge or simply ignored, another instance of the mistreatment she and other Latino patients have faced as Spanish-speaking immigrants, she wondered.

Was the risk of venturing across the border worth it? Yes.

Even as the virus tried claiming Quintero as a casualty, it infected her son, husband and grandson — infections Quintero believes she carried into their home. At last count, 15 friends and family members have been taken from Quintero’s life by the coronavirus.

“People get to the point of where my uncle was. He waited until he couldn’t breathe any longer,” she said. “That’s when they want to look for help.”

Throughout the pandemic, the coronavirus has disproportionately carved a path through the nation’s Latino neighborhoods, as it has in African American, Native American and Pacific Islander communities. The death rate in those communities of covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, is at least double that of Whites and Asian Americans, federal data shows.

Even more stunning: the deadly efficiency with which the virus has targeted Latinos in their 30s and 40s.

In California, which has the nation’s largest Hispanic population, state figures show that as of Wednesday, Latinos ages 35 to 49 died of the virus at more than 5 1/2 times the rate of White people the same age. The gap was even wider a few months earlier: In December, when Quintero fell ill, Latinos in the prime of life were nearly seven times more likely to die than their White peers, according to the Covid Tracking Project, an independent group that collects case, death and hospitalization data.

Put another way: 35to-49-year-old Latinos represent 41.5 percent of people in that age range in California but account for about 74 percent of deaths.

The staggering loss of life at younger ages, plus higher overall mortality rates, is projected to have caused Latinos’ life expectancy nationally to plummet by about three years during 2020, according to a peerreviewed study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesin February. The results were calculated using federal data. The authors of that study, who recently updated their findings, report that Latinos’ reduction in life expectancy was more than three times the loss experienced by the White population.

“A younger age at death represents more lost years of life,” said Theresa Andrasfay, the study’s coauthor and a postdoctoral scholar studying health disparities at the University of Southern California. “This shows just how this pandemic is operating a little bit differently than other causes of death.”

The findings proved all the more stunning because for years researchers had recognized that Latinos in the United States lived longer than White people, despite social, political, economic and environmental factors that typically erode health and shorten lives. This advantage had grown since 2006, when the federal government began separately documenting Latinos’ life expectancy.

Now because of the pandemic’s overwhelming loss of life and disproportionate amount of death among younger Latinos, about two-thirds of that advantage has been erased in one year, said the study’s coauthor, Noreen Goldman, a Princeton University demographer who has studied Latino health and socioeconomic disparities in health for years.

“That’s huge,” Goldman said. “One would have thought [that advantage] would have carried over to covid. And we’re not done. What’s going to happen by the end of 2021? My hunch is that there will no longer be an advantage at all.”