New York health officials estimate that nearly a quarter of New York’s adults were infected with coronavirus during last spring’s catastrophic wave and that the tax was even higher among black and Hispanic residents.
Estimates, based on the results of antibody tests for more than 45,000 city residents last year, suggest that black and Hispanic New Yorkers were twice as likely as white New Yorkers to have antibodies to coronavirus – evidence of a previous infection.
Hispanic New York had the highest rate, with about 35 percent testing positive for antibodies, according to the study, whose authors include officials and researchers at the city’s Department of Health and the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety. Of the black New Yorkers, 33.5% had antibodies. Among Asian New Yorkers, the rate was about 20%. For white New Yorkers, the rate was 16%.
Antibody studies of some segments of the population have become a useful way to assess what percentage of people have been infected and which groups have been most at risk, especially since there were limited tests for the virus during the first wave.
The new paper, which was accepted by the Journal of Infectious Diseases, has substantial limitations: Of the 45,000 New Yorkers in the study, less than 3,500 were black, a major underrepresentation. Participants were also partially recruited through online ads, which the study’s authors acknowledge could have attracted people who thought they were exposed to Covid-19.
But the study adds to experts’ understanding of the disproportionate tax pandemic on black and Latino people.
His findings also come amid an effort to vaccinate several people in the United States. A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the number of Americans, especially black adults who want to get vaccinated, has continued to rise. According to an analysis conducted last month by The New York Times, black people were still inoculated at half the rate of white people. The differences are particularly alarming, as black and Latino people and Native Americans have died twice as much as whites.
In New York, about 44% of white adults received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, while 26% of black adults and 31% of Latino adults received, according to city data.
Experts and community leaders across the country say that, above all, lower vaccination rates are linked to technological and linguistic barriers and disparities in access to vaccination sites. Other factors include misinformation on social media and hesitation to be vaccinated. Hesitation among African Americans, experts say, may be linked to a long-standing mistrust of medical institutions that have long abused black people.
Recent data in New York “shows how front-line workers have endured the hardships of the first wave of the pandemic,” said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health who was not involved in the study. . She noted that many jobs with higher levels of exposure – such as grocery store employees, childcare providers and workers in transit – have relatively fewer white workers.
“These were people who didn’t have the luxury of being able to work virtually,” she said.
Dr. Kitaw Demissie, who is the dean of the School of Public Health at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn and was not involved in the study, noted that household overcrowding could also have contributed to different rates of infection. Some predominantly Latin neighborhoods, which were particularly affected in the first wave, had high rates of household overcrowding.
More than 32,000 people in New York have died in total from Covid-19, according to a New York Times database.