Hispanic immigrants of working age — 20 to 54 years old — are over 11 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than U.S.-born men and women who are not Hispanic, according to a USC study released Monday.
The study highlights California’s urgent need to bring vaccinations, treatments and other interventions to a demographic that comprises the backbone of the state’s agricultural and service industries, according to Erika Garcia, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the study’s first author.
“We’ve known since early on that people of color are more likely to die of COVID,” Garcia said. “The CDC says that Hispanics, overall, are 2.3 times more likely to die than non-Hispanics. Yet when we looked at this specific, working-age group, we were astonished to see much higher disparities.”
When the researchers looked at young, foreign-born Latinos, they found COVID deaths as a proportion of the typical total deaths was 11.6 times higher than that of young, U.S.-born, non-Hispanics. The disparities persisted, even after accounting for education level, which served as a proxy for socioeconomic status in the study.
The study, published March 29 in the Annals of Epidemiology, looked at California death certificate data from 2020. Researchers identified 10,200 COVID-19 deaths in California occurring between February and July last year. Death certificate data, rather than hospital system or insurance company data, allowed the researchers to capture COVID deaths among historically marginalized groups, including immigrants, who might be underrepresented in health care or insurance systems.
Overall, those who died were primarily age 65 or above, male, Latino, foreign-born and had an education level of high school or below. When the researchers drilled deeper into the data, they found disparities were larger among younger-aged Asian/Pacific Islanders, Blacks, Latinos and whites.
For example, among Black men and women 20-54 years old, the COVID death rate was nearly five times that of whites. Among Latinos of the same age, both U.S.-born and foreign-born, the COVID death rate was 8.5 times that of whites, according to the study.
“While they are experiencing lower COVID-19 mortality overall, younger populations should not be left out of public health interventions,” Garcia said. “There are complex risk structures that differ not only between groups but also within a group, which need to be considered in public health guidelines and policies.”
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Lisa says
Maybe because they actually go out and work so most of these low life’s sit in their ass and wait for their assistance . That’s why they get sick.
david says
And so wte people are racist, right? Maybe they have rotten habbits and their behaviors are immature.. Maybe its their own fault and not the fault of the wte devil. The only racists here are you. Just keep beating this drum. The vast majority of people in this countruy are getting real fed up with this non sense so keep pushing it. Its going to backfire on you all.
Read the article again. says
Hey Dave,
I hope you’re okay–you seem pretty upset. At no point does this article assert, imply, or allude that white people are racists. It’s a hasty generalization to claim that Hispanic immigrants of working age as a group “have rotten [sic] habbits and their behaviors are immature.” I’m not going to call you a racist, because that seems to hurt your feelings, but you do see how that’s racist right? You must see that at least.
The article explicitly states that these disparities in COVID-19 health outcomes might be due to Hispanic immigrants of working age being “underrepresented in health care or insurance systems.” Again, it doesn’t say at any point whatsoever that white people are racist, yet you came to the comments section and said something racist. You must see how that’s kind of ironic.
In Jean-Paul Sartre’s work on racism *Anti-Semite and Jew*, he gives the example of an anti-Semitic lady who claims she hates Jews because a Jewish furrier ruined one of her favorite furs, “But why did she choose to hate Jews rather than furriers? Why Jews or furriers rather than such and such a Jew or such and such a furrier? Because she had in her a predisposition toward anti‐Semitism” (7).
Regarding what you describe as “The vast majority of people in this [sic] countruy…getting real fed up with this non sense,” Sartre would say, “Everybody understands that emotions of hate or anger are involved, but ordinarily hate and anger have a provocation: I hate someone who has made me suffer, someone who condemns or insults me. We have just seen that anti-Semitic [or otherwise racist] passion could not have such a character. It precedes the facts that are supposed to call it forth; it seeks them out to nourish itself upon them; it must even interpret them in a special way so that they may become truly offensive. Indeed, if you so much as mention a Jew to an anti‐Semite, he will show all the signs of a lively irritation. If we recall that we must always consent to anger before it can manifest itself and that, as is indicated so accurately by the French idiom, we ‘put ourselves’ into anger, we shall have to agree that the anti‐Semite has chosen to live on the plane of passion” (11).
In other words, Sartre is saying that it’s highly suspicious that you became incensed at the mere mention of immigrant Hispanics of working age. This article doesn’t mention you, disparage white people as “[sic] wte devil[s],” or otherwise harm you in any way. You’ve gotta admit that it’s kinda weird that you voluntarily clicked on an article about Hispanic health outcomes, scrolled down to the comments section, and became voluntarily angry about something the article did not say. Dave, you might be a racist, and that’s fine! Just snap out of it, because racism is a choice that’s ruining this country for everybody. It’s hurting you! Anger is not pleasant or healthy. Start by reading Sartre’s book, or at least sitting down and seriously analyzing why you’ve chosen to feel and act this way. Y0u’re in control.
Read it for free here: http://abahlali.org/files/Jean-Paul_Sartre_Anti-Semite_and_Jew_An_Exploration_of_the_Etiology_of_Hate__1995.pdf
COVID-19 Expert says
A poor diet and lifestyle…
Read the article again. says
That plays a part in it for many of the people that have died of Covid-19, sure. It’s just kinda weird that you’re focusing exclusively on peoples’ behavior and neglecting to mention that we live in a neoliberal society where medicine is a for-profit industry and not a public service. Neglecting to mention that the crap that passes for food in this economic system is actively harmful. That people are so worn out by the nature of work under capitalism that they have a difficult time living a healthy lifestyle. Nobody exists in a vacuum, and the tendency to focus exclusively on personal behavior is just weak analysis.
Like the article says, Hispanic immigrants have a more difficult time than the rest of us accessing healthcare. That’s just what the study says, but if you want to harp on about just poor diet, just poor lifestyle choices, then that’s fine too. It’s just an intellectually bankrupt approach.
To remedy this I suggest you read Adam Smith’s *On the Wealth of Nations*, where this alleged Father of Capitalism specifically points out that the division of labor is at once the source of a country’s wealth and its misery, “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life” (603). Marx merely repeats the sentiment in *The German Ideology*.
I put it to you that systems matter. Hispanic immigrants aren’t just dropping dead at 11x the rate of U.S.-born people of their own volition. The food, work, and healthcare capitalist societies are capable of providing are a joke. All we achieve by blaming individuals is the absolution of the systems they live in. We shouldn’t be afraid to do the structural analysis necessary to understand why things happen, neither should be afraid to withhold blame from the individual, but people are only capable of so much given the constraints of the system they live in. Sapere aude, either way.
On the Wealth of Nations can be read for free here: https://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_WealthNations_p.pdf
NiceTry says
Too many words and a clear absence of spelling and grammar mistakes for these low lives to read, let alone, understand. Welcome to the AV, it is riddled with useless white supremacists, hate and discord. This is the first place in California where I’ve witnessed blunt racist slurs and hateful rhetoric in public. We must rid ourselves of these monsters that hold a political seat in the AV before we can weed out the rest of this awful and poisonous plague.