Our ongoing Color of Coronavirus project monitors how and where COVID-19 mortality is inequitably impacting certain communities—to guide policy and community responses to these disproportionate deaths. The coronavirus has claimed more than 155,000 American lives through Aug. 4, 2020—nearly 14,000 more than our last update two weeks ago, or averaging about 1,000 deaths per day. We know the race and ethnicity for 93% of the cumulative deaths in the United States.
Our latest update reveals continued wide disparities by race, most dramatically for Black and Indigenous Americans. We also now adjust these mortality rates for age, a common and important tool that health researchers use to compare diseases that affect age groups differently. This results in even larger mortality disparities observed between Black, Indigenous, and other populations of color relative to Whites, who experience the lowest age-adjusted rates nationally.

See our work cited in Forbes, CNN, NBC News, Vox, JAMA, Politico, Newsweek, Al Jazeera, the Washington Post, The Hill, The Guardian, the New York Times and numerous other outlets.

The APM Research Lab has independently compiled these death statistics. (Learn more about how). The result is the most robust and up-to-date portrait of COVID-19 mortality by race available anywhere, with a lens on inequitable deaths. We have been tracking these deaths for four months now, revealing COVID-19’s growing toll on all Americans, but with the heaviest losses among Black and Indigenous Americans. In addition, Pacific Islanders and Latinos have seen the sharpest rise in their mortality rates during the past two weeks, as shown below.