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Abstract
Background The disproportionate burden of the COVID-19 pandemic on racial/ethnic minority communities has revealed glaring inequities. However, multivariate empirical studies investigating its determinants are still limited. We document variation in COVID-19 case and death rates across different racial/ethnic neighbourhoods in New York City (NYC), the initial epicentre of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak, and conduct a multivariate ecological analysis investigating how various neighbourhood characteristics might explain any observed disparities.
Methods Using ZIP-code-level COVID-19 case and death data from the NYC Department of Health, demographic and socioeconomic data from the American Community Survey and health data from the Centers for Disease Control’s 500 Cities Project, we estimated a series of negative binomial regression models to assess the relationship between neighbourhood racial/ethnic composition (majority non-Hispanic White, majority Black, majority Hispanic and Other-type), neighbourhood poverty, affluence, proportion of essential workers, proportion with pre-existing health conditions and neighbourhood COVID-19 case and death rates.
Results COVID-19 case and death rates for majority Black, Hispanic and Other-type minority communities are between 24% and 110% higher than those in majority White communities. Elevated case rates are completely accounted for by the larger presence of essential workers in minority communities but excess deaths in Black neighbourhoods remain unexplained in the final model.
Conclusions The unequal COVID-19 case burden borne by NYC’s minority communities is closely tied to their representation among the ranks of essential workers. Higher levels of pre-existing health conditions are not a sufficient explanation for the elevated mortality burden observed in Black communities.
- Epidemics
- Ethnicity
- Health inequalities
- Neighbourhood/place
- Social inequalities
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Footnotes
Contributors DPD designed and directed the project and carried out the analysis and directed the writing of the manuscript. RF assisted with the interpretation of the results and the writing of the manuscript.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Map disclaimer The depiction of boundaries on the map(s) in this article does not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of BMJ (or any member of its group) concerning the legal status of any country, territory, jurisdiction or area or of its authorities. The map(s) are provided without any warranty of any kind, either express or implied.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Ethics approval The data for the analysis are all publicly available de-identified data at the ZCTA-level (from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Centers for Disease Control and the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s repository on Github).
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement All data relevant to the study are included in the article.