Race & COVID19 Survival Rates
…when only considering COVID cases that have an outcome (either mortality or recovery) there is no difference in survival rates based on race.
The denominator matters…
Crude Mortality Rate
Whenever the mortality rate for X group is discussed, it’s presented as the rate per 100K people of X group, & the term disproportionate is generally applied when stating that X group represents 20.9% of deaths though Hispanics only make up 18.3% of the population. That’s the crude mortality rate.
Survival Rate/ Case Fatality Rate
A far less reported statistic is the survival rate, or — if you reverse it — the case fatality rate. The survival rate/ case fatality rate is is calculated by the number of confirmed deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases that are no longer cases (either due to mortality or recovery). When considering the chance that COVID19+ Hispanic, Black, or Asian minorities will die compared to White cases, there is no significant difference.
The nine studies reported below reflect the most available evidence related to the survival rate & race due to the unfortunate reality that not all states/counties collect/report disaggregated patient data.
Race Doesn’t Influence COVID19 Survival Rates
Minorities have been disproportionately affected by COVID19 relative to Whites, but the survival rate among infected individuals does not differ by ethnoracial background. Consider the following (please note that the month is provided for each citation rather than the year… because obviously):
1. Antonio C. C. Guimarães et al., September: “We found an exponential dependence on the [COVID19] mortality rate by age and a higher lethality in the male population.” — but not ethnoracial identity.
2. Chengzhen Dai et al., October: Male sex & being older predicted dying but… “Race/ethnicity was not significantly associated with hospital [COVID19] mortality in adjusted analyses of all 3,321 hospitalized patients.”
3. Jeremy Gold et al., April: “Black patients were not more likely than were nonblack patients to receive IMV, to die, or to experience the composite outcome of IMV or death.”
4. Kabarriti et al., September: “…women were at lower risk of death compared with men… and and older age was strongly associated with the risk of death…” and Black (60.2%) & Hispanic (62.3%) patients had higher rates of hospitalization than White patients (47.7%). However, mortality rates were significantly lower for Hispanic (16.2%) & Black (17.2%) than White (20%) patients.
That is… “patients who identified as Hispanic… or Black… had somewhat improved survival compared with White patients.”
5. Price-Haywood et al., June: Being older predicted higher dying but… “Black race was not associated with higher in-hospital [COVID19] mortality than white race.”
6. Sara Cromer et al., September: Male sex & being older predicted a higher likelihood of dying from COVID19 but not ethnoracial identity.
7. Silvia Munoz-Price et al., September: “While Black race and poverty were both independently associated with hospitalization… neither were associated with [COVID19] mortality.”
8. Tian Gu et al., October: Male sex & being older predicted dying but… “No statistically significant racial differences were found in ICU admission and [COVID19] mortality based on adjusted analysis.”
9. Yehia et al., August: Being a male & old age predicted a higher COVID19 mortality rate, but… “while Black US residents may be at higher risk of contracting COVID-19 and represent a disproportionate share of COVID-19 death, mortality for those able to access hospital care does not differ from White patients.”
In short, when only considering COVID+ cases that have reached an outcome (either mortality or recovery, notwithstanding the ongoing morbidity that some recovered patients experience), there is no difference in survival rates based on race.
XX Advantage
Note that nearly all of these race/ethnicity focused investigations casually documented women’s higher survival rate — adding to the chorus of research highlighting the XX advantage in this pandemic (Chakravarty et al., 2020; Conti et al., 2020; Di Stadio et al., 2020; Jin et al., 2020; Nascimento et al., 2020; Richardson et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020; Wenham et al., 2020; Zhao et al., 2020; Zijian et al., 2020).
Please review the 19 Reasons Why pieces for more information related to differential COVID outcomes due to sex (XX vs XY) & gender (especially self jeopardizing outcomes of toxic male gender socialization).
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COVID insights that America can learn from Africa’s success (CNN Report by Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak & Rifaiyat Mahbub)
Here are America’s raw COVID19 mortality numbers by race as of October 13th from locations with disaggregated ethnoracial data:
White: 109,137
Hispanic: 43,953
Black: 43,844
Asian: 8,182
Indigenous: 1,886
(See also: CDC Data on Race & COVID)