To grasp who’s dying of #Covid-19, look to social factors like #race - STAT
▻https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/15/whos-dying-of-covid19-look-to-social-factors-like-race
The MIT researchers’ key finding is that the underlying reasons for the link between race and death rate are not the usual suspects.
“Policymakers’ natural instinct is to think this correlation is because of income disparities, or having health insurance, or diabetes, obesity rates, smoking rates, or even use of public transit,” Knittel said. “It’s not. We controlled for all of those. The reason why [Black people] face higher death rates is not because they have higher rates of uninsured, poverty, diabetes, or these other factors.”
The Sutter study, too, adjusted for age, sex, comorbidities, and income; the higher hospitalization rate for Black patients wasn’t explained by any of those.
That leaves other factors. “If I were a policymaker,” Knittel said, “I’d be looking at things like the systemic racism that affects the quality of insurance African Americans have and the quality of the health care they receive.”
