State officials said Wednesday they were worried the coronavirus pandemic could be disproportionately impacting black Virginians, but that they lacked key data to truly understand what was happening.
Elsewhere, evidence has emerged showing the virus was devastating minority communities. In Louisiana, roughly 70% of the COVID-19 patients who died are black, even though African Americans make up just 32% of the state’s population. In Illinois, 43% of people who died are black despite the group making up only about 14% of the state’s population.
Here, however, Virginia officials acknowledge their data is incomplete. The state lacks information regarding the patient’s race and ethnicity in more than half of its 3,645 confirmed COVID-19 cases.
Virginia’s Secretary of Health and Human Resources Dan Carey said he doesn’t believe the state will be able to retroactively recover the information for the patients who have already been processed. He said the state needs to take steps to better collect such data moving forward.
“We’re seeing racial disparities in COVID cases in places like New Orleans and New York and we must be able to measure this here, in Virginia,” Gov. Ralph Northam said at a Wednesday news conference.
The majority of states are not publicly breaking down their coronavirus statistics. Virginia is one of only about a dozen.
Public health experts and officials have suggested that the stark disparities evident in the available coronavirus statistics are the result of deep-rooted social and economic inequalities. In Virginia, Oliver said, people of color are more likely to be living in densely populated urban areas and lack access to healthcare.
“They tend to be concentrated in essential industries, and are working,” Oliver said. “There’s less social distancing in these communities and less opportunity for teleworking. And all of these factors play into that.”
And then if COVID-19 — the disease caused by the coronavirus — does spread among these groups, higher rates of diabetes, hypertension and other underlying health problems could place them at greater risk of serious health consequences, Oliver said.
From hospitalization totals to a lack of widespread testing, however, bad data continues to hamper the state’s ability to understand the full scope of the coronavirus’ impact on Virginia.
Virginia does have racial data on 1,667 cases. Of those, about 30% involved African Americans, who make up about 20% of the state’s population. About 55% of the cases are white, a group that makes up roughly 69% of the state’s population.
Oliver said about 12% of cases were Latino patients.
The issue, Oliver said, is that many healthcare providers aren’t collecting and passing along racial information when they’re sending test specimens to private labs, who then report the results to the state.
“This obligates us to do a better job of tracking racial and demographic data of confirmed cases,” Northam said at the news conference, explaining he had directed the Virginia Department of Health to make sure staff did just that going forward.
Just as the state can’t say how many patients infected are black, it also can’t say how many African Americans are hospitalized. A national report released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that about 33% of the patients sick enough to need care were of African descent. Only 12 percent of the country’s population identifies as black.
And even when coronavirus patients die in Virginia, officials still only have racial data on about half of the cases.
Of those 75 total deaths, Oliver said 14 were African American and three were Latino. But he stressed the statistics could be under counted, saying officials will be able to work back at some point and obtain the correct information.
To try to mitigate these disparities, Oliver said the state’s unified command leading the COVID-19 response has established a “health equity workgroup,” which is looking at every aspect of the state’s response through a lens of equity, diversity and inclusion.
“I think that’s historic for Virginia and historic for the whole country,” he said.
Peter Coutu, 757-222-5124, peter.coutu@pilotonline.com