“This is a public health crisis that isn’t getting better, and in some ways is getting worse,” Kathleen Mullan Harris, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and chair of the committee, said during a March 2 webinar to discuss the report.
The report shows that declining life expectancy among racial minorities and working-class white people before the pandemic “set the stage for the challenges we saw during COVID-19,” says epidemiologist Sandro Galea, dean of Boston University School of Public Health. Galea assisted in the peer review of the committee’s analysis.
People with underlying health conditions — often the very conditions driving the trend of premature deaths — have been especially vulnerable during the pandemic. For instance, studies have found that obesity creates a substantial risk for hospitalization and death following a coronavirus infection (SN: 4/22/20). And federal data cited in the report reinforce that the virus has not affected all groups equally. From January 1, 2020, to January 9, 2021, 4.3 percent of all deaths among working-age white residents involved COVID-19. That figure reached 10 percent for Black residents, 21.4 percent for Hispanics, 14.2 percent for Native American groups, 13 percent for Asians and 16.1 percent for Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders.
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