The LA Times reports on COVID-19 among the Latino community in California:
In California, younger Latinos are dying of COVID-19 at much higher rates than their white and Asian counterparts. Younger Black people also are dying at high rates, but the disparity is starkest for Latinos....In California, Latinos ages 20 to 54 have died from COVID-19 at a rate more than eight times higher than white people in the same age group, according to a study by USC’s Department of Preventive Medicine.
The Times doesn't bother mentioning this, but the study they cite is for COVID-19 deaths between February and July 2020—the very beginning of the pandemic. There's no way to know if things have stayed the same more recently.
And then there are the numbers themselves. During the first half of 2020, a grand total of about 1,100 young people (age 20-54) died of COVID-19. I can't quite decipher the mortality rates in the paper, but given the white/Hispanic demographics of California this very roughly suggests about 700 Hispanic deaths and 100 white deaths if the mortality ratio is 8:1.
The total population of the young in California is about 14 million. Of that, about 5 million are white and 5 million are Hispanic. This gives us a final mortality rate from COVID-19 of 0.014% for Hispanics and 0.002% for whites. In other words, 1 in 50,000 for whites vs. 1 in 7,000 for Hispanics.
This is an example of what I was talking about yesterday. In one sense, a disparity of 8:1 is horrific, and of course we need to figure out what's going on. On the other hand, is this headline...
Young Latinos are dying of COVID at an alarming rate — the effects could be felt for generations
...really justified based on data that tells us the COVID-19 death rate of young Hispanics was 1 in 7,000 during the first half of 2020? That's not so clear.
https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/is-watching-the-1984-ghostbusters-movie-killing-people-a-statistician-s-perspective
Numeracy is dying of IGNORANCE at an alarming rate - the effects will be felt for generations.
Direct comparisons of small numbers is tricky, and corrections have to be applied to both groups to account for co-morbidities. If this deals with hospital access, then that needs to be addressed immediately.
More generally, on average, there are around 6.6K deaths in the US per day (ca. 2,400K/year). That's a really low percentage of the country's population too.
San Mateo county is 24% hispanic/latin with an average household size of 2.87.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanmateocountycalifornia
Fresno is 54% hispanic/latin with an average household size of 3.14.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fresnocountycalifornia
If hispanics/latinos typically have larger household sizes in California, that probably creates a higher R0 for covid leading to a higher infection rate and death rate.
Also, hispanics have higher levels of obesity in California: http://healthpolicy.ucla.edu/publications/documents/pdf/2015/obesityreport-jun2015.pdf
They also have a higher numbers in riskier - for an airborne disease anyhow - jobs with fewer employers willing to protect them.
It's not an apples to oranges comparison at all.
In San Mateo County Hispanic/Latino have had 39% of the recorded Covid cases but only 24% of the deaths.
Whites have had only 19% of the cases but 40% of the deaths.
Why are so many more whites dying of Covid?
They are the huge majority of the senior citizens vulnerable to dying while Hispanics are mostly young and less vulnerable. Even with those numbers, the age adjusted death rate could be higher for Hispanics.
Of course " age adjustment " is not totally objective and la county's numbers there seem perhaps a bit biased to make the age adjusted Hispanic death rate look relatively too large. When you get into such small chances of death, minor errors in age adjustment can create big errors in final result.
During the beginning of Covid, San Mateo senior living and assisted living facilities were hit particularly hard. Most of the early deaths in our County were amongst those in those places. The assisted living facilities are pretty expensive and mostly populated by elder whites and Asians. I believe elder Hispanics are more likely to live with their families.
If you look at our data dashboard:
https://www.smchealth.org/data-dashboard/county-data-dashboard
You will see there is a category for 90 and over. I was surprised that the death rate for people in that age group was “only” 30% for those that were positive for covid. Not that 30% isn’t a huge number, but I would have thought that getting the disease at that age would pretty much be a death sentence. I took a snapshot of the dashboard on July 1st. Since that date the death rate has been only 9%. So the vaccine has been very effective.
I suspect that there are cultural issues that contributed to the higher Hispanic rates beyond things like more work in the service industry. Don't know enough about it to say what they are exactly, but there are cultural differences and a gap this large seems likely to be tied in part to those differences.
John Oliver had something about this on his show the other day. Immigrant families are getting their news from YouTube channels in their own language with lots of vax misinformation. His point was that since the "news" wasn't in English, it wasn't monitored.
Guess there can be a value to assimilation.
The 2020 census estimates Hispanics are 18.7% of the US population.
CDC data (as of 12/08/21) shows Hispanics account for 17% of Covid deaths, and that's fairly consistent between last year and this year.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm
IOW Hispanics are dying in roughly the same numbers as the population as a whole, maybe a little less.
It's possible there are disparities if you drill down by state and age group, but more likely, especially since the study data ends in July 2020, the claims in the Times article are garbage.
2020 census says non-Latino whites are 57.8% of the US population.
CDC data (at link above) says non-Latino whites account for 63% of Covid deaths.
IOW whites overall are dying at a HIGHER rate than the population as a whole.
Yet this CDC page says that Latinos/Hispanics face 2.1 times the risk of Covid death that whites do.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html#footnote03
The note: "Numbers are ratios of age-adjusted rates standardized to the 2019 U.S. intercensal population estimate."
So when adjusting for age, instead of appearing to die as a lower rate than whites, Hispanics appear to be dying at twice the rate. That's a BIG adjustment. No idea how accurate it is, but I imagine that fine point is lost on anyone following media coverage.
A separate note:
Older whites seem to be particularly hard hit. A disproportionate number of the 800,000+ Covid deaths are whites over 50, and that could have an impact on elections at the margins.
The deaths of young people from Covid are a result of them failing a basic intelligence test. Mercy killing. Suicide by stupidity. Take your pick.
Some of the things mentioned are a partial explanation.
The Hispanic community had significantly higher infection rates , which you could see at the time just by looking at neighborhoods. Although that was really only the case in the last half of the period , but as that is when the bulk of the cases occurred , it dominated the study. Funny but I live in between heavily Hispanic and heavily white neighborhoods. And , in March, I went to the Hispanic neighborhood to grocery shop a few times because the case rate was much lower there. But that changed quick .
And part of the reason that the case rate was so high among Hispanics was that they do often live in households with larger groups of people, which vastly increases the spread. As time went on , it became clearer that the biggest infection risk was within households and not in public. Once one member got infected, most family members did. And, even controlling for family size is not enough as large Hispanic families have less space per person than similar size white families and live in a manner that it is near impossible for an infected family member to isolate from the others.
Plus with multiple family members infected in a small place, the viral load when infected is higher. And that increases the death rate per infection. Hispanics got sicker more because they got a higher dose of virus when infected.
But also definitely true that Hispanics on average did not take as many precautions and did not abide by the restrictions as much as whites did . By observation, it was clear that asians were most careful, followed by whites , then blacks and Hispanics at the bottom . And by a good margin.
I mentioned shopping at Hispanic grocery stores in March when cases were low there. Lines were also much shorter- at mainstream grocery stores, you had a wait in line just to get in. But felt riskier as , at the Hispanic market, the customers and employees were often ignoring the legal restrictions like masking.
But one thing I have noticed. Although fewer whites and blacks ignore the legal restrictions ( actually fairly rare now ), the ones that do are often in your face and defiant. While the larger number of Hispanics that ignore them will comply sheepishly if asked ( or even given a look).
But, even considering all the differences, the disparity in this study is way too big to be really believed. I expect there is some sort of error causing part of it. I would note the study finds a smaller disparity in older groups , an amount that is believable based on expected differences known.
And any small bias error in counting cases can produce a big difference in result when the error is on such small numbers .
They must be watching too much Fox news.
I followed the daily reports for Los Angeles County in 2020. They were broken down into neighborhoods. One that really stood out was just west of Downtown (south of Silverlake) where the case and mortality was over 5x as large as other areas. That is an overwhelmingly immigrant Hispanic area with multi-generation families living together, who are largely poor (no healthcare), and service employees that needed to take crowded buses to get to work. A Hispanic friend who lives elsewhere, but where rates were somewhat high, said some of it might be due to cultural behavior - notably socializing outdoors (usually in front of a house) and close mingling.
Young Hispanics have handled it the best. Stop with the dialectical poises. Just accept it and move on. Educated white naturopathic Democrats likewise. Now young latins are at herd immunity.
If we believe that covid is somehow especially relevant to fat tissue
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.24.465626v1
and if we note that in CA obesity is over 40% in hispanics vs 25% in whites, that's at least one part of an explanation.
The numbers (at least publicly available) don't give us finer granularities for things like relative obesity rates in the specific age group, and I think we do not know further covid details like "does the degree of obesity matter, in a step-wise, or non-linear fashion".
But, like so much else about covid, I suspect that when all is said and done, this attempt to force a political slant on the data will prove just one more data point that says more about the journalists involved than about the real world.