Question: It’s been many months since we revisited trends in case fatality rates (Q&A of 1/19/21). Let’s take a look!
Answer: Yesterday– alongside coauthors, YJ Choi and David Bishai–I presented at the Annual Population Association of America Conference our work entitled “COVID-19 Case Fatality Rates in the US: Racial and Ethnic Disparities Persist.” Our work was so well received we won an award! (self-congratulatory pat on the back!) Anyway, I’m pulling one figure from that presentation to share updates on case fatality trends (Figure 1). In the left-hand panel, you see crude case fatality rates over time by race and the right-hand panel shows the same, but adjusting for age (for a refresh on age-adjustment, see Q&A of 11/24). As you can see:
- Case fatality rates have declined over time across all racial and ethnic groups (left panel);
- Age-adjusted case fatality rates reveal racial and ethnic disparities that are hidden by crude case fatality rates (right panel); and
- Whites have experienced the lowest case fatality; Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics have experienced elevated case fatality (right panel).
In February 2021, the age-adjusted case fatality rate was 1.9% among Blacks, 1.9% among Asians, 1.6% among Hispanics, and 1.3% among Whites. This means that Black and Asian patients were dying at 1.46x the rate of White patients and Hispanic patients were dying at 1.26x the rate of White patients. Disparities in case fatality by race and ethnicity represent historic and present-day inequalities by race and ethnicity in the US.
Figure 1. Crude and Age-adjusted case fatality rates by race, over time, USA. (made by YJ Choi using data from CDC’s Case Surveillance Public Use Dataset)
