A senior official on the White House COVID-19 Response Team said on Monday that the United States is losing almost half of race and ethnicity data to coronavirus cases and vaccinations.
Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, president of President Biden’s COVID-19 Equity Task Force, said that understanding the existing disparities is rooted in understanding the data. However, the US does not know the race or ethnicity of 49% of those diagnosed with the new virus, or 47% for the same information among recipients of the vaccine.
“These insights from our data are essential to our ability to target and screen our response,” said Nunez-Smith at Monday’s meeting. “Without good data, we are at a disadvantage in terms of action planning.”
WITH CASES OF VARIANT CORONAVIRUS IN INCREASE, GET THE COVID-19 VACCINE ‘AS FAST AS POSSIBLE’, SAYS FAUCI
“We must treat these insufficient data points as an urgent priority,” she added.
The coronavirus pandemic emphasized long-standing and long-standing inequalities; Racial minorities suffer a high risk of hospitalization and death due to the new virus compared to white individuals, although rates vary by race / ethnicity.
Nunez-Smith cited several reasons behind the lack of vaccination data just a few weeks after the country’s implementation, such as a “previous lack of federal coordination, uneven implementation across states, inconsistent emphasis on equity in the first days of vaccination.”
COVID-19 VACCINE SUPPLY ‘PREVISIBILITY’ UNDER BIDEN IS A SOLVABLE PROBLEM, SAYS THE HEALTH CARE CEO
According to recent findings by the Kaiser Family Foundation, only “17 states were publicly reporting COVID-19 vaccination data by race / ethnicity” on January 19.
“As vaccine distribution continues, ensuring racial equality will be important in order to mitigate the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on people of color, avoiding increasing health disparities and achieving broad population immunity,” says the Foundation’s report of the Kaiser Family.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly 50 million vaccines against the coronavirus have been distributed to states and more than 31 million doses have gone into the arms of Americans.
GET FOX NEWS APPLICATION
The CDC has race and ethnicity data available for 51% of about 19.4 million cases, or 9,940,836 infections. According to the figures, white populations are responsible for the highest percentage of reported cases in 56% (or more than 5.5 million people), with Latin and black populations ranked next with 21% and 12% of cases with available data, respectively.
“That 49% of COVID-19 cases may in fact mirror the demographics of the other 51%, but it is more likely to reflect the inherent injustices in how our data is collected and reported in different places based on resources and how much equity is prioritized. “said Nunez-Smith during the briefing.
As for deaths due to the new virus, the CDC has 77% of race and ethnicity data available, for 239,877 deaths out of about 310,944, although the US has exceeded the total of 442,000 coronavirus-related deaths, according to University data Johns Hopkins.
Likewise, white populations had the highest percentage of deaths at 62%, with black and Latino populations lagging significantly behind at 16% and 13%, respectively. However, the rates of previously published rates from the CDC’s list of black and Latino populations are almost 3 times more likely to die from the virus compared to white individuals.