WA Department Of Health Hopes New Data Will Help Even Inequities

OLYMPIA, WA — The Washington State Department of Health has announced a plan to begin tracking and providing statewide case, hospitalization, and testing trends by race and ethnicity, part of an effort to better understand and address COVID-19 response inequities.

Previously, the DOH says race and ethnicity data for COVID-19 trends had been logged independently by public health investigators, who conducted interviews or searched medical records to determine each COVID-19 patient's race or ethnicity. Going forward, however, the DOH will be collecting that information itself and posting the data publicly on the state’s COVID-19 dashboard.

State health leaders say that better data gathering will help them as they try to assist minority communities that have been underserved during the pandemic.

“Many communities experience poorer health outcomes because of social inequities related to race, culture, identity or where they live. The presentation of COVID-19 trend data by race and ethnicity is a positive step towards monitoring health outcomes of racial and ethnic minority groups,” said Washington Secretary of Health Dr. Umair A. Shah. “We are committed to reexamining our priorities and the way we do our work to ensure we are being equitable. This enhancement to our COVID-19 data is a step in that direction.”

As of Monday, the DOH's data collection is only about 60 percent complete — the agency says it hopes to be up to 80 percent complete by year's end — but the preliminary results do paint a broad picture showing how the pandemic has disproportionately impacted some groups.

For example: there are currently 766,008 Washington COVID-19 cases where the patient's ethnicity and race is unknown, versus 399,769 cases where the ethnicity or race has been confirmed. Hispanic Washingtonians made up 26 percent of those 399,769— despite only making up 13 percent of the state's total population. Conversely, white Washingtonians take up 56 percent of COVID-19 cases, despite making up 68 percent of the state's population. Obviously, those ratios could change dramatically as the remaining unknown cases are investigated and categorized, but the state hopes that, ultimately, once they have a complete picture of Washington's race and ethnicity trend information, they'll be able to plug gaps in coverage.

>> Find the full dataset on the Washington State Department of Health's website.