Giving Compass' Take:

• Studies find that it is necessary to have more representation of minority communities in research projects. 

• Why is it critical to include accurate minority representation in research projects regarding the impact of COVID-19 on communities? 

• Read about minority representation lagging in other industries. 

Evidence is mounting that COVID-19 disproportionately claims the lives of people from minority communities, particularly African Americans.

In their recent paper in The Lancet researchers say investigators must factor in participants’ ethnicities when designing and reporting research including clinical trials, just as they do with age and gender.

Previous studies have shown that racial and ethnic minorities in the United States are inadequately represented in many research projects despite a higher likelihood of their being affected by the conditions under investigation.

Researchers say the same appears to be true for the new coronavirus and point out that of the approximately 1,500 COVID-19 studies registered on the National Institutes of Health-run clinicaltrials.gov, only a handful currently report collecting data on ethnicity.

National data shows that COVID-19 deaths among African Americans are nearly two or more times greater than would be expected based on their share of the population. Similarly, there is a disproportionately higher incidence of coronavirus cases among Hispanics and Latinx. In the United Kingdom, more than a third of patients critically ill with COVID-19 were from racial and ethnic minority groups.

K.M. Venkat Narayan of Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, a co-author of the paper, says COVID-19 has focused attention on racial health inequities in the US and elsewhere. “We need to fix this problem, and one of the ways to do that is to ensure that racial and ethnic minorities and underserved populations are actively included in research studies.”

Read the full article about inequities and minorities by Rajee Suri at Futurity.