Crystal Cox/Business Insider
A group of New Yorkers cross the street in Manhattan on April 6, 2020.
In a White House briefing on Tuesday, Anthony Fauci described the disproportionate impact the coronavirus outbreak is having on black Americans, saying the crisis is "shining a bright light on how unacceptable that is."
The outbreak is highlighting "some of the real weaknesses and foibles in our society," he added.
New research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts that disparity in stark relief, showing the extent to which black Americans account for more hospitalizations than they should based on their share of the US population.
The report notes that 33% of the US's COVID-19 hospitalizations are black patients, though black people make up 18% of the overall US population.
Andy Kiersz/Insider
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the reason for this disparity most likely has to do with the prevalence of "underlying medical conditions - the diabetes, the hypertension, the obesity, the asthma."
These preexisting health issues put patients at higher risk of developing severe cases.
In some areas, black Americans are dying at higher rates
The CDC report analyzed 1,482 hospitalizations across 99 counties in 14 states during the month of March. The agency had race and ethnicity data in 580 of those cases; not all states are collecting and releasing that information.
States and cities that are tracking the racial breakdown of coronavirus patients, however, are seeing black Americans die from COVID-19 in alarmingly disproportionate numbers.
Crystal Cox/Business InsiderA New Yorker wearing a face mask.
In Michigan, black people make up 14% of the state population but represent 40% of the coronavirus deaths, according to state health officials.
Illinois's numbers are similar: of the state's 462 deaths, 262 of them were black patients, about 43% of the total fatalities. The state has about 1.8 million black residents, or about 14% of the population.
In North Carolina, where the population is 21% black, 38% of the state's COVID-19 deaths were black patients.
About 28% of coronavirus fatalities in New York City, meanwhile, were black patients, and 34% were Hispanic, according to the New York State Department of Health.
Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesA man wears a face mask and surgical gloves to prevent coronavirus spread on a New York City subway train, March 11, 2020.
So far, 12 people in St. Louis, Missouri, have died from COVID-19, all of whom were black, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on Wednesday.
ProPublica reported on April 3 that 81% of the deaths in Milwaukee County were black patients, despite the fact that only 26% of the county's population is black.
Underlying conditions increase the risk of severe COVID-19 infections
The CDC report collected data about underlying health problems among 180 of the 1,482 hospitalized Americans in March. Of that subset, 89.3% had at least one underlying condition.
Andy Kiersz/Insider
The most commonly reported conditions were hypertension and obesity, followed by chronic lung disease (including asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), diabetes, and heart disease.
According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, 32% of black Americas older than 18 had hypertension (high blood pressure), compared to 24% of whites in 2018. Non-Hispanic black Americans were 1.3 times more likely to be obese than non-Hispanic white people.
Black Americans were 20% more likely to die from heart disease than whites in 2017. In 2014, black people in the US were more than twice as likely to die due to asthma than white people, and four times more likely to be be admitted to the hospital for the condition.
The new CDC data also reinforced other known trends about which age demographics are most at risk: Fatality rates for older people are far higher than for younger ones. People older than 65 had the highest rate of hospitalization per capita, the report showed - about 13.8 hospitalizations per 100,000 Americans.
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