A new peer-reviewed study in Nature Communications shows how pre-existing neighborhood social factors like housing, work, income, insurance help explain the higher rates of infection for COVID19 in communities of color
New York City neighborhoods that had higher levels of socioeconomic disadvantage experienced more COVID-19 infections and deaths, according to Mount Sinai scientists who created a neighborhood-level COVID-19 inequity index.
The index measured factors that fueled inequities in the residents’ lives, such as employment and commuting patterns, population density of their neighborhood, food access, socioeconomic status, and access to health care. This allowed the scientists to compare between neighborhoods the contributions of these social factors in facilitating disease transmission during the first wave of the pandemic in a study published in Nature Communications in June.
“Much of the early rhetoric around COVID-19 disparities centered on comorbidities which, due to health disparities, may have explained why communities of color were suffering higher mortality. But we were seeing more people of color getting infected in the first place,” said Daniel Carrión, PhD, MPH, first author and postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “Our research team wanted to add to the literature outlining how structural racism is related to neighborhood disadvantage, and how that disadvantage is related to increased COVID-19 infections and mortality.”
The COVID-19 inequity index showed that the disparities were considerably worse based on neighborhood racial and ethnic composition; Black neighborhoods had the highest average inequity index, followed by Latinx communities, while white neighborhoods had the lowest. The authors believe one of the reasons for these disparities is the diminished capacity to socially isolate based on where someone lives.
