California releases data on race of 37 percent of coronavirus patients, working to get more
Gov. Gavin Newsom said data is slowly trickling in from across California on the racial breakdown of people who have tested positive for the virus that causes COVID-19, but that doesn’t include much information from Sacramento County where public health officials met Wednesday to determine how they can get that information.
Around the nation, some cities and states have reported that the respiratory disease is having an out-sized impact on African Americans.
Newsom said that the state has racial and ethnic identification for 37 percent of 16,957 people who have tested positive for the new coronavirus. Of those cases, the California Department of Public Health reported that whites represent 37 percent of confirmed cases; Latinos, 30 percent; Asians, 14 percent; other, 9 percent; blacks, 6 percent; multiracial, 2.5 percent; 1.6 percent native Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders; and 0.2 percent, American Indians or Alaska Natives. The agency did not explain why the numbers add up to slightly more than 100 percent.
Those numbers track roughly along the lines of the general population, Newsom said.
In terms of COVID-19 deaths, the state has numbers on 39 percent of those who have died, and 43 percent have been white, 29 percent Latino, 16 percent Asian, 5 percent other, 3 percent black, 2 percent multiracial, 1 percent Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander and 0.6 percent American Indian or Alaska Native.
Although numbers statewide are roughly tracking along the lines of the general population, the Los Angeles Times reported that African Americans were seeing a much higher mortality rate than their representation in that area’s population.
Los Angeles County has racial data on 57 percent of its confirmed cases, and the figures show that 28 percent of those who have died are Latino, 27 percent white, 19 percent Asian, 17 percent black and 9 percent other races or ethnicities.
African Americans comprise 9 percent of L.A. County’s population, while Latinos make up nearly half of it.
The racial disparities have been even more striking in other parts of the country. For instance, ProPublica reported Friday that almost half of Milwaukee County’s 945 positive tests and 81 percent of 27 deaths were African Americans. But blacks represent just 26 percent of the county’s population is 26.
Today, the American Medical Association and other leading physician groups urged the Trump administration to collect, analyze, and make available data that includes race, ethnicity, and patients’ preferred spoken and written language and how they relate to the testing status, hospitalization, and mortality associated with COVID-19 patients.
“Social and health inequities are longstanding and systemic disturbances to the wellness of marginalized, minoritized, and medically underserved communities,” the letter stated. “While COVID-19 has not created the circumstances that have brought about health inequities, it has and will continue to severely exacerbate existing and alarming social inequities along racial and ethnic lines, e.g., in housing stability, in employment status, in healthcare access, and in food security.”
In an interview with The Sacramento Bee, Dr. Aletha Maybank, the AMA’s chief health equity officer, said she hoped the conversation about these disparities would not focus on genetics and behavior.
“Those are the two things people tend to do to communities of color and those who are marginalized,” she said. “They get blamed for what happens to them instead of looking at the historical context in this country of how they’ve been treated down the line rather than looking at how economies have been structured — where people live, what kind of jobs they can get and what kind of education they have.”
Long before COVID-19, Maybank said, the organization that was a precursor to the National Academy of Medicine issued a landmark report in 2003 titled “Unequal Treatment” highlighting the amount of implicit bias that African Americans were experiencing from physicians.
There has been lots of other evidence on that through the years, she said: Physicians still believe that blacks are more capable of tolerating pain and refuse to prescribe them medications that they give white patients with the same conditions. Black children don’t get prescribed antibiotics in the same way as white children, she said.
Any emergency will exacerbate these kinds of disparities in care, as physicians are required to make decisions rapidly, Maybank said.
In Sacramento County, health chief Dr. Peter Beilenson said that some race and ethnicity data are coming in with the coronavirus tests, but not much. The test results are sent to the county by doctors, hospitals, private testing labs, he said, and they all have different reporting styles.
Beilenson is working with Sacramento County’s Public Health Officer, Dr. Olivia Kasirye, to request more of that data, he said.
“We will start doing this in a more robust way,” he said. “I talked with Olivia about ways to capture the race issue. It’s hit and miss now.”
This story was originally published April 8, 2020 at 5:12 PM with the headline "California releases data on race of 37 percent of coronavirus patients, working to get more."
