Elderly Americans are still hardest hit by Covid-19 deaths. The numbers paint the picture.
The National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control, receives daily death certificate data from states. The numbers are updated weekly but data from some states lag.
As of May 6th, 44,016 Covid-19 deaths were reported to the CDC. Of those, 35,161 or 80 percent of all deaths were people 65 years or older. The deaths are recorded in ten-year age groups. The greatest number of deaths occurred among those over 85 years, 13,776. That's almost a third of all Covid-19 deaths.
And who were these elderly people? Non-Hispanic whites comprise 51.9 percent of Covid deaths and are 39 percent of the weighted distribution of the population. Non-Hispanic blacks represent 17.9 percent of the Covid deaths and 18.6 percent of the weighted distribution of the population. Asian and Hispanic deaths are much lower than their weighted popuation distribution.
Below, as screenshot of the CDC's data:
Table 2a. Percent distribution of deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) with distribution of the weighted percent population by race and Hispanic origin group, for the United States and jurisdictions with more than 100 deaths available for analysis.
As reported earlier, American whites and blacks are the hardest hit by Covid-19, not Hispanics and Asians.
