Health Day: One Reason COVID Is More Lethal for Black Americans

Black COVID-19 patients in the United States are more likely to die than white patients, but there would be 10% fewer deaths among Black patients if they could get the same level of hospital care as white people, according to new research. “Our study reveals that Black patients have worse outcomes largely because they tend to go to worse-performing hospitals,” said study co-author Dr. David Asch. He is executive director of Penn Medicine’s Center for Health Care Innovation. “Because patients tend to go to hospitals near where they live, these new findings tell a story of racial residential segregation and reflect our country’s racial history that has been highlighted by the pandemic,” Asch said in a University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine news release. For the study, Asch and his colleagues examined data on more than 44,000 COVID-19 patients on Medicare treated at nearly 1,200 hospitals in 41 states and the District of Columbia. Nearly 11,000 patients were Black and about 33,500 were white. Read more at Health Day.