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The true death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic on many communities of color—from Portland to Navajo Nation tribal lands in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, to sparsely populated rural Texas towns—is worse than previously known.
Mortality data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention point to COVID-19′s disastrous impacts, in a new analysis by the Documenting COVID-19 project at Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation and MuckRock, in collaboration with several newspapers, including WW.
The U.S. system for investigating how people die is a patchy, uneven network of coroners and medical examiners, which have wildly different resources and training from state to state—and even from county to county.
As a result, researchers often use excess deaths, a measure of deaths that occur above what demographers expect to see in a given time period based on past trends, to examine the pandemic’s overall impact. Nationwide, more than 280,000 excess deaths since 2020 have not been officially attributed to COVID.
Despite its high COVID vaccination rate—more than 80% of residents are fully vaccinated, according to CDC data—Multnomah County saw a stark increase in excess deaths from 2020 to 2021. The deaths were disproportionately located in communities of color, particularly Native American, Black and Pacific Islander communities.
Some of those excess deaths resulted directly from COVID. While the overall number of official COVID deaths in Portland did not change significantly from 2020 to 2021, the distribution shifted: The rate of Black deaths more than doubled from 2020 to 2021. Death rates among other groups remained constant or dropped (see chart below).
Charlene McGee runs programs aimed at improving public health among the county’s Black residents. McGee connected the high Black death rate to a history of poor access to health care, as well as higher rates of chronic conditions, such as diabetes, high blood pressure and hypertension. She also pointed to vaccine hesitancy in the Black community, tied to past and present negative interactions with the medical system.
“In 2022, we still hear about the Tuskegee study,” she says.
Beyond the official COVID deaths, deaths from other causes went up in the second year of the pandemic above what demographers estimated for Multnomah County. To researchers, such an increase could indicate that some COVID deaths have been incorrectly reported.
In Multnomah County, less than half of excess deaths were officially labeled as COVID in 2021.
The Multnomah County Health Department acknowledged it doesn’t routinely analyze local death data or compare Multnomah to other counties.
Read more at muckrock.com/covid-uncounted.