NPR, May 22, 2020: Harvard Researchers Find ‘Inequality On Top Of Inequality’ In COVID-19 Deaths
Much is still unknown about the coronavirus, including a full picture of perhaps its most important impact: who it has killed.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that “current data suggest a disproportionate burden of illness and death among racial and ethnic minority groups.” The death toll is also incomplete, because not everyone who dies of COVID-19 is counted under that cause of death, among other reasons.
Racial, ethnic and socioeconomic data about people who have died of COVID-19 are not all readily available either. So researchers at Harvard instead looked at the cities, towns and ZIP codes of people who have died of all causes. They compared the number of people who have died against what would be expected in a normal year, or “excess deaths.”
What they found is “inequality on top of inequality,” says Jarvis Chen, a social epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
