What a Standard Candle Reveals: Inequality in Outcomes in the COVID Era

The long-existing gap in mortality rates by race widened in 2020.

The COVID pandemic has shone a light on so many aspects of our culture, from our woefully inadequate public health infrastructure, to the way that political ideologies can shape interpretations of data. One factor that makes COVID a useful lens to pick out the inequities in our society is that it is basically a standard candle.

The idea of the standard candle comes to us from physics — knowing how bright a given astronomical object should be compared to its measured brightness lets us tell how far away it is. COVID is like that in a way. Biologically, COVID is just as capable of infecting and killing the rich and the poor, Black and white. And yet, throughout the pandemic, outcomes among certain groups — minorities, the poor, those without good access to care have been dramatically worse.

And now, thanks to this paper appearing in Annals of Internal Medicine — we can finally put some real numbers to the burden these communities have faced during the pandemic, using another standard candle, the excess death rate.