New research points to inequities between Black and brown communities and white populations during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A team analyzed some 18 million COVID tests. The research found that Black and Hispanic people were more likely to test positive for COVID-19 than white Americans.
University of Delaware Assistant Professor of Epidemiology Daniel Harris led the research team.
“Black and brown communities are marginalized here in the US across multiple dimensions, and that increases their risk of being exposed to diseases like COVID-19," Harris said.
The research also found Black and Hispanic communities were more likely to be at the leading edge of transmission when new variants of COVID-19 developed.
“And this is important because new strains have less known and less well characterized epidemiology," Harris said. "We don't know generally how transmissible they are, what their morbidity profile looks like and what this means is that certain communities are bearing the brunt of that novelty.”
Harris’s research was conducted with colleagues at Brown University and Walgreens, and funded in part by a grant from the National Institute on Aging.
