By Kristina Fiore
Source Medpagetoday
When it came to excess U.S. deaths during the COVID pandemic, racial and ethnic disparities hit younger populations particularly hard, a cross-sectional study showed.
People ages 25 to 64 had the greatest increases in observed-to-expected all-cause mortality ratios, and these were highest among American Indian/Alaska Native (1.45), Hispanic (1.40), and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander (1.39) groups, Jeremy Faust, MD, of Mass General Brigham in Boston, and colleagues reported in JAMA Network Openopens in a new tab or window. (Faust is MedPage Today’s editor-in-chief.)
“Those in the working age group were dying at especially disproportionate rates,” co-author Utibe Essien, MD, of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles, told MedPage Today. “Not only were minoritized groups exposed to higher rates of COVID because they weren’t able to work from home, or they had higher rates of comorbidities, or they had less access to healthcare, but these rates of deaths were just so much higher than what we would have seen in non-COVID years.”
Read more https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/equity-in-medicine/112355