During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans of color were far more likely to be hospitalized or die of the disease than white Americans, a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finds.
Researchers analyzed hospitalization data from 99 U.S. counties, including more than 140,000 patients who caught Covid between March 2020 and February 2021.
Non-white Americans were up to four times more likely to be hospitalized with Covid and up to seven times more likely to die of the disease.
Native Americans faced the highest risk with 233 Covid deaths for every 100,000 people - 7.2 times higher than the death rate for white Americans, who had 32 deaths for every 100,000 people.
This higher risk may be tied to people of color working essential jobs, living in low-income urban areas, and relying on public transportation - along with other factors, the researchers said.
'Equitable access to Covid preventive measures, including vaccination, is needed to minimize the gap in racial and ethnic disparities of severe Covid,' the researchers wrote.
Minorities face dramatically higher risk of being hospitalized or dying of Covid in the first year of the pandemic, a CDC study finds. Pictured: A member of Louisville Metro EMS tends to a patient experiencing a Covid emergency in Louisville, Kentucky, September 2021
Throughout the first year of the pandemic, non-white Americans faced higher Covid hospitalization rates - up to eight times higher - than white Americans
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Covid has disproportionately impacted black, Latino, and other non-white Americans.
In the U.S., people of color are more likely to work essential jobs that put them at increased risk of encountering the coronavirus.
They're also more likely to be low-income, live in urban communities and rely on public transportation - all additional drivers of increased Covid risk.
Numerous studies have shown higher Covid case rates, hospitalization rates and death rates in non-white Americans.
For example, the COVID Racial Data Tracker at the COVID Tracking Project found that black, Native American, Hispanic,and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Americans all had significantly higher Covid death rates than white Americans during the first year of the pandemic.
A new study from the CDC provides additional evidence about the elevated risk that non-white Americans face for severe Covid disease.
This new analysis was published on Thursday in JAMA Network Open.
The CDC researchers used data from COVID-NET, a CDC surveillance system including hospitals in 99 U.S. counties - representing about 10 percent of the national population.
The system spans 14 states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee and Utah.
In this analysis, the CDC researchers included about 143,000 patients.
All of the patients were hospitalized with a lab-confirmed Covid case between March 1, 2020 and February 28, 2021.
The analysis showed that non-white Americans had a
