County-Level Structural Racism and Covid-19 Mortality Rates among non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, and Hispanic Populations

Mary Roberts , University of Oxford

Structural racism is a central driver of the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 mortality borne by Black and Hispanic communities in the United States. Throughout the pandemic, these groups experienced significantly higher death rates than non-Hispanic Whites, reflecting not individual behaviors but the cumulative effects of racialized power hierarchies embedded in U.S. institutions. This study addresses these gaps by examining county-level structural racism and its relationship to Black-White and Hispanic-White disparities in COVID-19 mortality, providing one of the first multifaceted assessments of how structural racism has shaped pandemic outcomes using data from The National Center for Health Statistics, American Community Survey, and The Vera Institute. Descriptive maps appear to show higher structural racism tend to coincide with elevated Covid-19 mortality within the corresponding group. However, preliminary analyses remain inconclusive. A likely explanation is that these analyses do not adjust for county-level age structures, which may serve as an important confounding factor.

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 Presented in Session P6. Health, Mortality, and Ageing 2