Latino, Black Residents Hit Hardest By Coronavirus In Lake County

WAUKEGAN, IL — Black and Latino residents in Lake County have been hit far harder by the coronavirus than white communities during the first months of the outbreak, data shows. Despite making up less than a quarter of the county's population, Hispanic residents have accounted for more than half of its COVID-19 cases, according to the Lake County Health Department.

Hispanic people living in Lake County tested positive at a rate nearly nine times as high as white residents, while the infection rate for Black residents was almost four times as high, when adjusted for age differences between populations.

The stark racial disparities at the county level are consistent with the nationwide findings of a New York Times analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention case records it obtained after filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to secure their release.

Nationwide, it found Latino and African-American people were three times as likely as their white counterparts to contract COVID-19 and nearly twice as likely to die from the virus.

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In Lake County, white residents have been infected at an age-adjusted rate of 44.4 cases per 10,000 residents. There have been a total of 2,630 cases and 271 deaths among the county's non-Hispanic white population, equating to a death rate of more than 10 percent among white residents, according to the Lake County Health Department.

Black people have seen an infection rate of 167.1 cases per 10,000 residents, when adjusted by age. The total of 45 black people have died among 816 confirmed coronavirus cases, a 5.5 percent mortality rate.

Hispanic residents in Lake County became infected at an age-adjusted rate of 396.8 cases per population of 10,000. According to the health department, 82 deaths of Hispanic people have been associated with the virus out of 4,692 cases for a death rate of under 2 percent.

In Lake County cases where racial or ethnic information is available, Hispanic people have accounted for more than 53 percent of the COVID-19 cases in Lake County but less than 20 percent of deaths, the department reported.

According to Census data, Lake County population is 60 percent non-Hispanic white, 22.4 percent Hispanic or Latino, 8.4 percent Asian, 7.5 percent Black or African American.

The CDC provided the New York Times with 1.5 million records, but not all of them included complete data, so the newspaper's analysis is based on about 640,000 infections detected prior to the end of May across almost 1,000 counties in the U.S. The Lake County data on the racial impact of the virus was last updated June 25.

According to the Times, the nationwide age-adjusted infection rate for white people was 23 cases per 10,000, 62 per 10,000 for Black people and 73 per 10,000 residents for Hispanics.

That means local white people have been infected at about twice the national average, Black Lake County residents have contracted the virus at about two and a half times as average and Lake County Latinos have become infected at nearly five and a half times the national rate.

The Times found people who identify as Asian were about 1.3 times as likely as their white counterpart to contract coronavirus. But Asians were excluded from the Lake County Health Department's calculation of prevalence rates due to low case counts and the size of the population. The department reported Asian people made up just over 3 percent of cases, nearly 5 percent of deaths and had a mortality rate of about 7 percent.

When broken down by age groups, the differences between ethnic groups become more pronounced. More than a quarter of Latino people who have died from coronavirus-related conditions were younger than 60, while only 6 percent of white people who died were that young.

While many have pointed to a higher prevalence of underlying health issues among Black and Latino people to explain those communities' higher death rates, the new CDC data "underscores inequities unrelated to other health issues," the Times reports. People living in more crowded households and those unable to work from home face increased opportunities for infection.

"Some people have kind of waved away the disparities by saying, 'Oh, that's just underlying health conditions,'" Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the Times. "That's much harder to do with the case data."

There have been 405 coronavirus-related deaths among Lake County residents out of more than 10,000 confirmed cases, as of Thursday, according to the Lake County Health Department.

But the Illinois Department of Public Health has refused to disclose the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 in individual municipalities, arguing it violates health privacy laws.

As a result, the differences in death rates between communities with larger populations of non-white residents and those with almost exclusively white populations could not be calculated.

People with more severe infections are more likely to seek medical treatment and be tested, which could explain part of the racial disparities revealed by the data, according to the Times.

However, CDC officials said there are clear, significant racial disparities in the number of cases and deaths. The Times also noted CDC officials estimated in June the true total number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. is likely about 10 times higher than the official tally.

Earlier: Uptick In Lake County COVID-19 Cases In Young People, Outbreaks At Sports Camps