Racial disparities in COVID-19 deaths decreased in Connecticut over time as pandemic shifted from urban to rural, Yale study finds – Hartford Courant

Racial disparities in Connecticuts COVID-19 deaths gaping in the early days of the pandemic narrowed over time as the crisis spread outward from urban to rural areas, a new Yale School of Public Health study has found.

Though Black and Hispanic people in Connecticut have remained more likely to die from COVID-19 than white residents, the narrowing of those disparities may suggest the success of campaigns to boost testing and vaccination among those communities, researcher Margaret Lind said.

In general we saw that, over the course of the pandemic in Connecticut, there has been a decline in the disparity of COVID-19 related mortality, said Lind, who led the study. We are moving in the right direction, and [equity] is something that could be achieved if we keep moving forward.

According to the study, Black and Hispanic people in Connecticut were more than four times as likely as non-Hispanic white people to die from COVID-19 between March 1 and Aug. 25, 2020, when the disease hit poor, under-resourced, urban communities hardest.

But over time, the study found, the COVID-19 mortality rate decreased only slightly among white Connecticut residents while falling much more sharply among Black and Hispanic residents. From July 13 to Dec. 13, 2021, the most recent period the study analyzed, Hispanic people were still about twice as likely to die of COVID-19 as white people, but the gap between Black and white residents had nearly disappeared.

This trend appears to mirror a national pattern in which the burden of COVID-19 gradually shifted over time from urban centers to whiter, more rural areas, which often had lower rates of vaccination and fewer control measures.

Racial disparities in Connecticut's COVID-19 deaths have diminished over the course of the pandemic, a new Yale study has found.

Despite the narrowing of disparities in Connecticut, the pandemic has remained, on balance, more significant for some groups than for others. Dating back to March 2020, state data shows, Black and Hispanic people have been substantially more likely to catch COVID-19 and about twice as likely to die from the disease, after adjusting for age.

We did see this attenuation overall, but there is still room to get better, Lind said. We can reduce these inequities, but we are not there yet.

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Disparities in COVID-19s impact in Connecticut were apparent from the earliest days of the pandemic, as state data almost immediately showed Black and Latino people catching and dying from the disease at higher rates than white people.

Experts say some groups were hit harder than others for several reasons. For one thing, Black and Latino people in Connecticut are more likely to live in densely populated areas and work front-line jobs that put them in direct contact with coworkers and customers. For another, decades of discrimination mean they are more likely to have underlying conditions like asthma and diabetes, which exacerbate the effects of COVID-19.

Though Linds team did not specifically study why these disparities shrunk over time, she guesses it was a result of state and federal programs aimed at distributing resources more evenly, combined with evolving attitudes toward COVID-19 among different groups. Throughout much of the pandemic, survey data has shown that people of color in Connecticut were more likely than white people to, for example, wear masks in public.

Whereas Black and Latino people in Connecticut were initially far less likely than white people to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, those gaps have narrowed over time, state numbers show, which each racial and ethnic group now showing relatively high levels of vaccination.

Lind says her findings underscore the importance of measures aimed at reducing health inequities a lesson she says could be useful ahead of the next health crisis.

These measures such as trying to get testing equitably distributed, trying to get prevention measures ... widely utilized [helped], she said. The utility of education around that is something we should really think about and continue to move forward with, recognizing that this will not be our last global pandemic.

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Racial disparities in COVID-19 deaths decreased in Connecticut over time as pandemic shifted from urban to rural, Yale study finds - Hartford Courant