In mid-March, House Resolution 1062 — “Declar[ing] racism a public health crisis” — was filed by two congressmen from Connecticut. “This resolution aims to highlight the detrimental effects communities of color face when seeking treatment,” they said in a press release.
In particular, H. RES. 1062 suggests that “during the COVID–19 pandemic, Black, Hispanic or Latino, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Native American communities experienced disproportionately high rates of COVID–19 infection, hospitalization, and mortality compared to the White population of the United States.”
This popular assumption overtook the medical establishment and the media soon after Covid-19 descended on America early in the election year of 2020. Early in the pandemic, blacks and Hispanics were dying at higher rates than whites, and this was viewed as irrefutable evidence of systemic racism in health care.
The media went all-in on this. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times ran stories on it in April 2020, as did NPR in September 2020 and The Washington Post in November 2020.
But the data shows, four years later, that this assumption was a rush to judgment — nonwhite people actually died in numbers that were comparable to their portion of the population. CDC data for 1,175,876 Covid deaths from January 2020 through February 2024 show that blacks comprised 13.6 percent of all Covid deaths, in line with their 13.6 percent of the population; Hispanics were almost 15 percent of mortalities, less than their 19.1 percent of the population; Asians
