New York City health officials estimate that nearly a quarter of adult New Yorkers were infected with the coronavirus during last spring’s catastrophic wave, and that the toll was even higher among black and Hispanic residents.
The estimates, based on antibody test results for more than 45,000 city residents last year, suggest that black and Hispanic New Yorkers were twice as likely as white New Yorkers to have had antibodies to the coronavirus – evidence of a previous infection.
Hispanic New Yorkers had the highest rate, with about 35 percent testing positive for antibodies, according to the study, whose authors include officials and researchers from the city’s health department and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. 33.5 percent of Black New Yorkers had antibodies. Among Asian New Yorkers, the percentage was about 20 percent. For white New Yorkers, the rate was 16 percent.
Antibody studies among segments of the population have become a useful way to gauge what percentage of people were infected and which groups were most at risk, especially since there were only limited tests for the virus during the first wave.
The new paper, which has been accepted by the Journal of Infectious Diseases, has significant limitations: Of the 45,000 New Yorkers in the study, fewer than 3,500 were black, a major underrepresentation. And the participants were recruited in part through online advertisements, which the authors acknowledge may have attracted people who thought they had been exposed to Covid-19.
But the study adds to experts’ understanding of the disproportionate toll the pandemic has taken on black and Latino people.
The findings also come amid an effort to vaccinate more people in the United States. A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the number of Americans, especially black adults, who want to get vaccinated, continues to grow. According to an analysis by The New York Times last month, black people were still vaccinated against half the number of whites. The differences are especially alarming because black and Latino people and Indians die twice as fast as whites.
In New York City, about 44 percent of white adults have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, while 26 percent of black adults and 31 percent of Latino adults have received it, according to city data.
Experts and community leaders across the country say the lower vaccination rates are generally linked to technological and language barriers and inequalities in access to vaccination sites. Other factors include social media misinformation and a reluctance to get vaccinated. The hesitation among African-Americans, experts say, may be related to a long-standing mistrust of medical institutions that have long assaulted black people.
The recent data from New York “shows how frontline workers were the victims of the first wave of the pandemic,” said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, who was not involved. in the study. She noted that many jobs with higher exposure – such as workers in supermarkets, childcare, and transit workers – have relatively fewer white workers.
“These were the people who didn’t 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 household crowds may also have contributed to different infection rates. Some predominantly Latino neighborhoods particularly hard hit during the first wave had a high hustle and bustle of households.
A total of more than 32,000 people in New York City have died of Covid-19, according to a database by the New York Times.