The coronavirus is killing Black, Hispanic, and American Indian children and teens at higher rates than white, according to just-released federal statistics.
We already knew that covid-19 affects more Black adults and adults of color, and it’s true for children too, according to a new study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the national public health agency under the Department of Health and Human Services.
The CDC found that almost all U.S. kids and teens who’ve died from covid-19 were Black or brown. There have been 391,814 known coronavirus cases and 121 deaths among people under the age of 21 from February to July, according to the latest figures.
While about 0.03 percent of coronavirus cases in kids and teens under 21 have been fatal so far, overwhelmingly, those deaths have been children who are Black or Hispanic. Fifty percent of all children in the U.S. are white, according to the Kids Count Data Center, but they account for 14 percent of childhood covid-19 deaths. Black children, meanwhile, comprise 14 percent of the population but account for more than double their ratio in deaths — 28.9 percent.
Of the 121 deaths, 29 percent were Black children, 45 percent were Hispanic children, 14 percent were white, 4 percent were American Indian or Alaska Native, the CDC reported.
“The data is horrifying, but not surprising to me,” Dr. Uché Blackstock, founder of Advancing Health Equity, told Business Insider. “Where you see marginalization and disadvantage, you’re going to find coronavirus.”
Why is this happening?
According to the CDC, it could be because many Black children live in the same households as Black adults, who are more likely to be essential workers and exposed to the virus on the job.
“Their risk of being infected is higher than white children,” Blackstock said.
Once again, these stats highlight how systemic racism can affect health. The CDC has tied to systemic racism to health risks. “Crowded living conditions, food and housing insecurity, wealth and educational gaps, and racial discrimination,” as well as lack of access to care all play a role in the higher rates of death in Black and brown children, the CDC report said.
Recent studies also indicate that redlining policies which kept U.S. neighborhoods segregated by race line up with higher rates of pre-existing conditions that can make covid-19 harder to fight.
More than 75 percent of the children who’ve died from the coronavirus in the U.S had at least one underlying medical condition.
Black and brown children also make up the overwhelming majority who develop a life-threatening complication called multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C, The New York Times reported.
“The disproportionate deaths among youths echo pandemic disparities well-documented among adults. Previous studies have found the virus’s death toll is twice as high among people of color under age 65 as for white Americans,” The Birmingham Times reported.
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During the pandemic, Trump has been claiming that children are “almost immune” from covid-19. Facebook and Twitter took down a video of Trump declaring this. In fact, this is the first time that Facebook has removed a post from the president for violating its coronavirus misinformation policy, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The video clip was from an interview aired on Fox News. Before it was removed it had about 450,000 views on Facebook, according to CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics company. It was reshared nearly 2,000 times. The same video was also shared by the Trump campaign’s account on Twitter and later reshared by Trump.
