Via The Washington Post: Covid U.S. death toll passes 150,000: Hispanics among hardest-hit. Excerpt:
When the virus first swept across the country, it devastated Black communities, killing African Americans at a disproportionately high rate in nearly every jurisdiction that published race data. In recent weeks, Hispanics and Native Americans have made up an increasing proportion of covid-19 deaths. The disease now accounts for nearly 20 percent of all deaths among those groups, higher than any other race or ethnicity in recent weeks, according to a Post analysis of the CDC data.
Both in hot-spot states, and in states where the total number of deaths has decreased, Hispanics make up an increasing share of those deaths — a signal that the pandemic’s shifting demographics are not due to its shifting geography.
The death rate among Native Americans, meanwhile, has stayed somewhat consistent, even as it declines for other groups.
States have reported an average of more than 1,000 virus-related deaths per day this week, the highest rate since late May, and experts say the toll is likely to increase rapidly.
“We’re playing with fire and gasoline and pine needles, and it could very well explode in our face, and I’m very concerned it will without serious and concerted action,” said Howard Markel, a historian and physician at the University of Michigan. “I fear that we are headed, given the way it’s being handled, to the worst contagious crisis in human history.”
Official government tallies tell only part of the story. The true toll probably exceeded 150,000 weeks ago. Epidemiologists say the country’s shoddy testing infrastructure has allowed virus fatalities to go undiagnosed. Also, the pandemic’s far-reaching effect on the health-care system has almost certainly contributed indirectly to many more deaths — in people afraid to seek medical care for other maladies, for example.
Some fear the growing toll will have a numbing effect on Americans’ psyches.
“At some point, the numbers get so big that they lose their impact,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “I worry as we continue to mark these milestones that they just become numbers, and they stop really resonating with us as deaths.”
In the pandemic’s first few months, deadly outbreaks in New York, along with surges in other cities in the Northeast and Midwest, fueled the country’s toll. In mid-April, New York state reported more than 1,000 deaths in a single day three times, accounting for nearly half of all deaths nationally.
But now the virus is entrenched in the Sun Belt. Texas, Florida, California, Arizona and South Carolina have recorded the most average daily deaths in the past week. Mississippi and Louisiana have also seen sharp upticks in their numbers of fatalities per capita.
And in many of these places, where the Hispanic share of the population is far higher than the national average, the coronavirus’s shifting demographic impact is most acute.
In Florida, California and Arizona, Hispanics consistently made up a disproportionate share of covid-19 deaths in June and early July. The disparity may be persisting, but CDC data lags state statistics, and the agency’s most recent numbers were not complete enough to include in the analysis. (The federal data about age and gender among covid-19 deaths were not broken down at the state level over time, so those demographic factors were not included in the analysis.)
In California, Hispanics account for 39 percent of the state population, but 46 percent of all virus deaths and 57 percent of virus deaths reported in the last week of June. In Texas, where Hispanics are 40 percent of the population, they account for an approximately proportional share of all virus deaths. In the last week of June, however, they made up 57 percent of the deaths.
