Racial and Ethnic Disparities in COVID-19: Evidence from Six Large Cities
- PDF / 501,264 Bytes
- 19 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 0 Downloads / 199 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Racial and Ethnic Disparities in COVID-19: Evidence from Six Large Cities Joseph Benitez 1
&
Charles Courtemanche 2
&
Aaron Yelowitz 2
Received: 22 July 2020 / Revised: 7 October 2020 / Accepted: 14 October 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract As of June 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has led to more than 2.3 million confirmed infections and 121 thousand fatalities in the USA, with starkly different incidence by race and ethnicity. Our study examines racial and ethnic disparities in confirmed COVID-19 cases across six diverse cities—Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, New York City, San Diego, and St. Louis—at the ZIP code level (covering 436 “neighborhoods” with a population of 17.7 million). Our analysis links these outcomes to six separate data sources to control for demographics; housing; socioeconomic status; occupation; transportation modes; health care access; long-run opportunity, as measured by income mobility and incarceration rates; human mobility; and underlying population health. We find that the proportions of Black and Hispanic residents in a ZIP code are both positively and statistically significantly associated with COVID-19 cases per capita. The magnitudes are sizeable for both Black and Hispanic, but even larger for Hispanic. Although some of these disparities can be explained by differences in long-run opportunity, human mobility, and demographics, most of the disparities remain unexplained even after including an extensive list of covariates related to possible mechanisms. For two cities—Chicago and New York—we also examine COVID-19 fatalities, finding that differences in confirmed COVID-19 cases explain the majority of the observed disparities in fatalities. In other words, the higher death toll of COVID-19 in predominantly Black and Hispanic communities mostly reflects higher case rates, rather than higher fatality rates for confirmed cases. Keywords COVID-19 . Coronavirus . Racial disparities . Ethnic disparities . Health disparities JEL Classification I14
Introduction By June 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA led to over 2.3 million confirmed infections, over 121,000 fatalities, and almost 31,000 hospitalizations (CDC, U. S. Centers for
* Aaron Yelowitz [email protected] Joseph Benitez [email protected] Charles Courtemanche [email protected] 1
Department of Health Management and Policy, College of Public Health, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40536, USA
2
Department of Economics, Gatton Business & Economics Building, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0034, USA
Disease Control and Prevention 2020, 2020c). Like many other issues pertaining to health and economic disparities, the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic falls disproportionately on Black and Hispanic communities. Through June 13, 2020, the rate of hospitalization for Blacks and Hispanics was more than four times as high as for Whites (CDC, U. S. 2020b). The pandemic is taking a substantial toll on physical, mental, and economic health across the USA, but disparities in whom
Data Loading...
