*Black Americans are dying from Covid-19 more frequently than white people. But two researchers found it’s not because of obesity or poverty.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management professor Christopher Knittel and graduate research assistant Bora Ozaltun analyzed daily Covid-19 death rates for a nearly two-month period for counties and states to understand the correlation between Covid-19 deaths and patients’ typical commutes, exposure to pollution, race and other factors.
While African Americans are dying at higher rates than white people, the researchers found obesity, poverty and smoking weren’t correlated to those deaths. Diabetes was ruled out, too.
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“Why, for instance, are African Americans more likely to die from the virus than other races? Our study controls for patients’ income, weight, diabetic status, and whether or not they’re smokers,” wrote Knittel in the study. “We must examine other possibilities, such as systemic racism that impacts African Americans’ quality of insurance, hospitals, and healthcare, or other underlying health conditions that are not in the model, and then urge policymakers to look at other ways to solve the problem.”
The MIT researchers’ work comes as Covid-19 cases are on the rise in several states and in African American communities. According to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project and Boston University for the COVID Racial Data tracker, black people represent 13% of the U.S. population but account for 23% of the known deaths from the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
More than 26,708 black people have died in the U.S. pandemic, and four of the five counties with the highest death rates from Covid-19 are predominantly black. In counties where black people are the majority, MIT found they’re dying at rates close to 10 times higher than white counties. Other at-risk groups include the elderly and Hispanics, although healthy, young people, have also died from Covid-19.
The difference isn’t because of income disparities or that white people have a larger net worth on average than African Americans and therefore access to better care, although Knittel said in an interview that’s where policymakers often look to lay blame.
“The reason why African Americans face higher death rates is not because they have higher rates of uninsured, poverty, diabetes,” said Knittel. “It could be because the quality of their insurance is lower, the quality of their hospitals is lower, or some other systemic reason. Our analysis can hopefully allow policymakers to focus on a narrower set of potential causal links.”
Source: African Americans Die More Frequently from Covid-19, but MIT Researchers Say Poverty Isn’t Why
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