Racial/ethnic minority and neighborhood disadvantage leads to disproportionate mortality burden and years of potential life lost due to COVID-19 in Chicago, Illinois

Pierce, Jacob B.; Harrington, Katharine; McCabe, Megan E.; Petito, Lucia C.; Kershaw, Kiarri N.; Pool, Lindsay R.; Allen, Norrina B.; Khan, Sadiya S.

Epidemiological studies have highlighted the disparate impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on racial and ethnic minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged populations, but data at the neighborhood-level is sparse. The objective of this study was to investigate the disparate impact of COVID-19 on disadvantaged neighborhoods and racial/ethnic minorities in Chicago, Illinois. Using data from the Cook County Medical Examiner, we conducted a neighborhood-level analysis of COVID-19 decedents in Chicago and quantified age-standardized years of potential life lost (YPLL) due to COVID-19 among demographic subgroups and neighborhoods with geospatial clustering of high and low rates of COVID-19 mortality. We show that age-standardized YPLL was markedly higher among the non-Hispanic (NH) Black (559 years per 100,000 population) and the Hispanic (811) compared with NH white decedents (312). We demonstrate that geomapping using residential address data at the individual-level identifies hot-spots of COVID-19 mortality in neighborhoods on the Northeast, West, and South areas of Chicago that reflect a legacy of residential segregation and persistence of inequality in education, income, and access to healthcare. Our results may contribute to ongoing public health and community-engaged efforts to prevent the spread of infection and mitigate the disproportionate loss of life among these communities due to COVID-19 as well as highlight the urgent need to broadly target neighborhood disadvantage as a cause of pervasive racial inequalities in life and health.