Is racism as deadly as Covid-19? It'll take 700K more White deaths for life expectancy to match Blacks: Study
The Covid-19 pandemic has killed over 170,000 in the US so far. How does the scale of this pandemic compare to another US catastrophe: racial inequality? According to a new study, the death rate for White Americans during the pandemic is likely to be much lower than the death rate for US Blacks in any given year, outside of the pandemic. This suggests that US racial inequality may be as deadly as Covid-19, it emphasizes.
"Even during the coronavirus pandemic, death rates for White people in the US are likely to be less than the death rates that African-Americans experience routinely every year. This gives a new perspective into just how extreme racial inequality is. It also poses a challenge. We’ve shut down the world to stop the spread of Covid-19, embracing extraordinary disruption to work, travel, and family life. Shouldn’t we be willing to embrace a similar scale of disruption to stop these deaths that occur every year?" study author Elizabeth Wrigley-Fielda from the Department of Sociology and Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, told MEA WorldWide (MEAWW).
The research included data on Covid-19 deaths as of July 29. Using demographic models, the author estimated how many excess White deaths would raise US White mortality to the best-ever (that is, the lowest) US Black level ever recorded. The lowest age-adjusted mortality for Blacks and Whites occurred in 2014. That year, Blacks experienced 1,061 deaths per 100,000 and Whites experienced 884 deaths per 100,000. Since then, mortality has increased for both racial groups. In 2017 — the most recent year with final death data — White mortality was 899 per 100,000 and Black mortality was 1,077 per 100,000, which is 20% higher than White mortality, says the study.
The analysis, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reveals that it would take 400,000 excess White deaths to equal the lowest death rate ever recorded among Blacks. For the White death rate in 2020 to reach levels that Blacks experience outside of pandemics, current Covid-19 mortality levels would thus need to increase by a factor of about 5. These estimates make it plausible that, even in the Covid-19 pandemic, White mortality will remain lower than the lowest recorded Black mortality in the US, says the researcher.
"For White mortality to reach levels that Blacks experience outside of pandemics, Whites would need to experience 400,000 excess deaths, beyond what is typical, this year. Current Covid-19 deaths among Whites are 81,176, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That means there would need to be nearly 5 times the current Covid-19 deaths in order for White mortality to reach best-ever Black levels. It was nearly 6, rather than nearly 5, when I wrote my paper, which uses data as of July 29. Since then, Covid-19 deaths have continued to increase," Wrigley-Fielda told MEAWW.
Moreover, White life expectancy in 2020 will remain higher than Black life expectancy has ever been, unless nearly 700,000 excess White deaths occur, reveals the study. "If fewer than 400,000 excess White deaths occur in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic for Whites will be less consequential to overall White mortality than racial inequality is for Black mortality every year. And unless 2020 sees 700,000 to 1 million excess White deaths — a 31 to 46% mortality increase from recent years — life expectancy for Whites, even amid Covid-19, will remain higher than it has ever been for Blacks," the findings state. It adds, "The legal and structural contexts that produce racial inequality have shifted dramatically since the early twentieth century, creating a more economically heterogeneous Black population. Yet, a century after the 1918 flu, the basic fact endures that Black disadvantage is on the scale of the worst pandemics in modern US history."
The author argues that the Covid-19 deaths themselves are highly disproportionately experienced by Black Americans and will almost certainly further widen the racial mortality gap. "To date, age-adjusted confirmed Covid-19 deaths are more than 2.5 times higher for Blacks than Whites. These deaths alone would increase the disparity between the most recent White and the best-ever Black age-adjusted mortality, by 27%. The results underscore that this extreme inequality in Covid-19 deaths is layered on top of stark disparities that have existed every year," explains Wrigley-Fielda.
According to the researcher, people have radically reorganized how they live to minimize the risks associated with Covid-19. Yet calls to radically reorganize social institutions for minimizing racial disparities remain highly contentious, she emphasizes. "These results should reframe these debates away from which transformations are politically tenable to, simply, which transformations will be effective in preventing harms associated with racism. I argue that, if Black disadvantage operates every year on the scale of Whites’ experience of Covid-19, then so too should the tools we deploy to fight it. Our imagination should not be limited by how accustomed the US is to profound racial inequality," concludes Wrigley-Fielda.