Covid-19 deaths are the greatest among non-Hispanic white people, not minorities. How do we know? Death certificate information is being transmitted to the Centers for Disease Control each day and the CDC is reporting provisional data each week. Death certificates are uniform throughout the country. 

 

 

Source: Table 1. Percent distribution of deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) with distribution of the weighted percent population by race and Hispanic origin group1, for the United States and states with more than 100 deaths available for analysis.

 

The provisional report only includes jurisdictions with more than 100 deaths. As of April 21, the distribution of Covid-19 deaths in the U. S. is 51.9 percent non-Hispanic whites. The weighted distribution of population of non-Hispanic whites is 39 percent. No other race or ethnicity has such a skewed death rate.

 

Some other numbers of note are that Louisiana black deaths are 45.8 percent of the Covid deaths but their weighted distribution of the Louisiana population is 36.1 percent.  Michigan has a slightly higher percentage of black deaths relative to the population distribution. The City of New York Hispanic distribution of cases is 13.1 percent and the Hispanic weighted population is 1.9 percent.

 

White people in California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Washington state have been hit very hard. In reading media reports, one would suspect that the deaths in nursing homes might be a major cause of the high rate of deaths for whites. 

 

The CDC website also has numbers of cases of Covid-19 by race and ethnicity but the data is very incomplete. There is no uniform reporting by race and ethnicity among health departments. States have different rules and a lot of numbers on cases  are missing. Minorities may have higher case numbers. It's difficult to tell because of data deficiency.

 

Many media sources claim that minorities are dying at higher rates than whites. That is not true.