THE COLOR OF CORONAVIRUS:
COVID-19 DEATHS BY RACE AND ETHNICITY IN THE U.S.

by APM RESEARCH LAB STAFF | AUGUST 5, 2020 | Next update Aug. 19

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.
KEY FINDINGS (data collected through Aug. 4):
Overall, actual American death rates from COVID-19 data (aggregated from all states and the District of Columbia) have reached new highs for all race groups:

1 in 1,250 Black Americans has died (or 80.4 deaths per 100,000)

1 in 1,500 Indigenous Americans has died (or 66.8 deaths per 100,000)

1 in 1,700 Pacific Islander Americans has died (or 58.7 deaths per 100,000)

1 in 2,200 Latino Americans has died (or 45.8 deaths per 100,000)

1 in 2,800 White Americans has died (or 35.9 deaths per 100,000)

1 in 3,000 Asian Americans has died (or 33.1 deaths per 100,000)

Black Americans continue to experience the highest overall actual COVID-19 mortality rates— more than twice as high as the rate for Whites and Asians, who have the lowest actual rates.

If they had died of COVID-19 at the same actual
rate as White Americans, about 18,000 Black,
6,000 Latino, 600 Indigenous, and 70 Pacific Islander Americans would still be alive.
Adjusting the data for age differences in race groups widens the gap in the overall mortality rates between all other groups and Whites, who have the lowest rate. Compared to Whites, the latest U.S. age-adjusted COVID-19 mortality rate for:

Blacks is 3.7 times as high

Indigenous people is 3.5 times as high

Pacific Islanders is 3.1 times as high

Latinos is 2.8 times as high

Asians is 1.4 times as high.
HOW TO EXAMINE THE DATA:
1. EXPLORE FINDINGS BY STATE OR FOR THE NATION
We’ve presented the data we’ve collected for the nation overall and each state as:

Actual mortality rates expressed per 100,000;

Indirectly age-adjusted mortality rates per 100,000; and as

Total deaths experienced by group.

If you’d like to examine the percentage of deaths compared to the percentage of population by racial group for each state (which previously appeared on this site), you can find this data in our complete data file.


2. EXPLORE FINDINGS BY GROUP
Select a group below to examine the differences by racial or ethnic group for all states with available data. For each group, we present total lives lost, actual and age-adjusted mortality rates, and a comparison against White Americans’ rates using the age-adjusted data, to examine where disparities relative to Whites are the greatest.

INDIGENOUS AMERICANS | ASIAN AMERICANS | BLACK AMERICANS | LATINO AMERICANS |
WHITE AMERICANS | NATIVE HAWAIIAN & OTHER PACIFIC ISLANDER AMERICANS
For more context about the shortcomings of some of the data, please read our note about Indigenous, Pacific Islander, Multiracial and Other Race Americans.

UNDERSTANDING AGE-ADJUSTED MORTALITY RATES
While there are many features of the novel coronavirus that are still unclear, this we know with certainty: The risk of dying from COVID-19 rises sharply with advanced age. About 2 in 100,000 Americans under age 45 have died from the virus, according to data submitted to the CDC through July 29. The COVID-19 death rate for Americans age 45-54 rises to 17 per 100,000; roughly doubles among those age 55-64 (39 per 100,000); and more than doubles among those age 65-74 (93 per 100,000). Among Americans age 75 and older, the death toll exceeds 365 people per 100,000, as shown below.
Due to this steep age gradient to COVID-19 mortality, it is important to consider the varying age distributions of America’s racial and ethnic groups. A higher share of White Americans are in the older age brackets than any other group. To illustrate this, consider that the median age of non-Hispanic White Americans is 44 years, according to the latest Census Bureau data. The comparable figure for all populations of color is considerably lower—for Asians (37), Blacks (34), Pacific Islanders (33), Indigenous (32) and especially Latinos (30).

Even within the same race groups, the age distribution varies—with retirement destination states such as Florida having a much higher share of older adults within their White population, for example.


Black, Indigenous, Pacific Islander and Latino Americans all have a COVID-19 death rate of roughly triple or more White Americans (age-adjusted).

So, to remove the role of age differences from COVID-19 mortality rates, we have also produced age-adjusted rates. Because mortality data is not available for all states by race and age jointly (which is preferred), we have used indirect standardization to calculate these rates. See our NOTES section for details and cautions about our method.

Adjusting the racial data we’ve collected for age differences increases the COVID-19 mortality rate for all racial and ethnic groups except for Whites, who experience a decrease, as shown below.
While Black Americans continue to experience the highest COVID-19 mortality rate after age-adjusting, doing so also widens the gap between Black and White mortality—from 2.2 to 3.7 times as high. Mortality rates for Indigenous people rise to 3.5 times as high as Whites’ mortality impact. Rates for Latinos and Pacific Islanders also rise substantially, to 3.1 and 2.8 times as high as Whites, respectively. Finally, the Asian mortality rate—which was slightly below the White rate—rises well above the White death rate (1.4 times as high), when age is taken into account. Put another way, Black, Indigenous, Pacific Islander and Latino Americans all have COVID-19 death rates of roughly triple or more the rates of White Americans (age-adjusted).

What does this mean? It indicates that many younger Americans who are Black, Indigenous or other people of color are dying of COVID-19—driving their mortality rates far above White Americans’. Despite their relative youthfulness (a protective factor against COVID), their death rates are elevated. As Brookings Institution has reported, “In every age category, Black people are dying from COVID at roughly the same rate as White people more than a decade older.”

Depending on the community, this may be due to numerous, reinforcing factors related to a higher likelihood of contracting the virus—such as greater workplace exposures, including inability to work from home or no access to sick days; living in geographic areas, housing arrangements including congregate settings (such as nursing homes, group homes, treatment centers, correctional facilities), or accessing public transportation where the virus is more easily spread. It also results from poorer outcomes after acquiring COVID-19—such as resulting from less access to testing; higher presence of underlying health conditions like diabetes, hypertension and asthma; and receiving delayed or poorer medical care, perhaps because they lack health insurance or distrust health providers or they are receiving inferior care. The racial disparities in COVID-19 mortality—due to these compounding, elevated risks from our systems of housing, labor force, health care, and policy responses—are what is termed systemic racism.

It is important to note that, while age-adjusted mortality rates help us remove age as a confounding factor so we can compare the impact of other differences among race groups, they are not the actual mortality rates experienced by these groups.