More than four years after the COVID-19 pandemic caused the world to come to a standstill, lessons in pandemic response are still being learned. What we know: the global pandemic disproportionately affected racial and ethnic minority groups across the U.S.
, with Black and Hispanic individuals being three to four times more likely to die from COVID compared to white individuals. Daniel Harris, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology in the University of Delaware's College of Health Sciences (CHS), took a deep dive into rarely obtained COVID-19 testing data. Harris led a team of investigators that included Walgreens and primary investigator Vincent Mor, professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown University, on a $1.
9 million National Institute on Aging grant to examine the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on population health. Harris and co-authors assessed 18 million COVID tests for racial and ethnic disparities in testing access and used whole genome sequencing to identify differences in novel variants of concern. Their research was recently published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health.
The cross-sectional study of free COVID tests from May 2021 through February 2022 found that non-white individuals were more likely to test positive for COVID-19. "Racial and ethnic differences in COVID-19 positivity can be attributed to several factors, many of which are rooted or stem from systemic racism," said Harris. Racial differences in housing, density, job type, acc.