New York health officials estimate that nearly a quarter of adult New Yorkers were infected with the coronavirus during last year’s catastrophic wave, and that the toll was even higher among black and Hispanic residents.
The estimates, based on the results of antibody tests for more than 45,000 residents in the city last year, suggest that black and Hispanic New Yorkers were twice as likely to have white coronavirus counterparts as white New Yorkers.
According to the study, Spanish New York residents had the highest percentage, with about 35 percent testing positive for antibodies, the authors of which include officials and researchers from the city health department and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Among black New Yorkers, 33.5 percent had antibodies. Among Asian New Yorkers, the rate was about 20 percent. For white New Yorkers, the rate was 16 percent.
Antibody surveys of sections of the population have become a useful way to determine what percentage of people are infected and which groups are at greatest risk, especially since the virus was limited during the first wave.
The new article, adopted by the Journal of Infectious Diseases, has significant limitations: of the 45,000 New Yorkers in the study, less than 3,500 were black, a significant underrepresentation. And the participants were recruited in part through online advertising, which, according to the study’s authors, may have attracted people who believed they had been exposed to Covid-19.
But the study contributes to the understanding of experts of the excessive toll that the pandemic has claimed on black and Latino people.
The findings also come amid pressure to vaccinate more people in the United States. A recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the number of Americans, especially black adults, who want to be vaccinated is still increasing. According to an analysis by The New York Times last month, black people are still being vaccinated against half of white people. The differences are particularly worrying, as black and Latino people and Native Americans die twice as much as the white people.
In New York City, about 44 percent of white adults received at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccine, while 26 percent of black adults and 31 percent of Latino adults, according to city data.
Experts and community leaders across the country say the lower vaccination rates are generally linked to technological and linguistic barriers and differences in access to vaccination sites. Other factors include misinformation on social media and a reluctance to be vaccinated. According to experts, hesitation can be linked to years of mistrust in medical institutions that have long abused black people.
The recent data from New York “shows how frontline workers have borne the brunt of the first wave of the pandemic,” said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, said, who was not involved in the study. She noted that many jobs with higher exposure – such as employees in grocery stores, childminders and transport workers – have relatively fewer white workers.
“It was the people who did not have the luxury of being able to work virtually,” she said.
Dr Kitaw Demissie, who is dean of the School of Public Health at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn and was not involved in the study, noted that the pressure from households may have also contributed to different infection rates. Some mainly Latino neighborhoods that were hit particularly hard in the first wave had a high number of households.
More than 32,000 people in New York City have died in total from Covid-19, according to a New York Times database.