Researcher Lauren Zalla discovered that the CDC was using a statistical method that controls for geography when reporting deaths from COVID-19 by race and ethnicity. This distorts the rates of COVID deaths in different racial and ethnic groups—and erases the idea that structural racism shapes where people live as well as their likelihood of contracting and dying from infections such as COVID-19.

This happened because the CDC accounted for deaths using a method called weighting to create a pseudo-population that more closely resembles the populations of places that have been hardest hit by the pandemic, such as Detroit, Chicago, and New York, Zalla and Noppert say. The method skews the weighted population to make the entire population of the United States look more like the racial and ethnic make-up of hard-hit areas. Therefore, the ethnicities harder hit by COVID look like they make up a greater percentage of the actual US population than they really do.

For example, Black and Latino people, combined, represent 31% of the actual US population, but under the weighted population, they make up nearly 48%. Non-Hispanic whites represent 60% of the population, and in the weighted analysis, they only represent 40% of the population

Controlling for COVID deaths by geography not only distorts the racial and ethnic make-up of the country, it also smooths over the pathways that have shaped where people of color live and work, the researchers say.

Read the full article about racial disparities in COVID-19 deaths by Morgan Sherburne at Futurity.