COVID-19 and US Mortality : Racial/ethnic and Geographic Disparities
COVID-19 and US Mortality : Racial/ethnic and Geographic Disparities
Intervenante : Irma Elo (Démographe, chercheuse associée, Department of Sociology & Population Studies Center à l’Université de Pennsylvanie, USA) ; discutant : Ilya Kashnitsky (professeur assistant à l’Université de Odense, Danemark)
In 2020, life expectancy in the United States experienced an unprecedented decline due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This decline in life expectancy was especially pronounced among racial and ethnic minority populations. We show that although these racial/ethnic disparities have persisted throughout the pandemic, they have narrowed over time and were less pronounced during the Omicron peak in November 2021-February 2022 than during the earlier waves. At the same time, we also demonstrate that excess mortality, which was most pronounced in large metropolitan areas in the early phase of the pandemic, has spread to nonmetropolitan areas and across the country from the Northeast region to the Southern, the Midwest and Western regions of the country.
Biographie de l’intervenante :
Dr. Elo has a PhD in Demography and Public Affairs from Princeton University. She is a Research Associate at the Population Studies Center and the Population Aging Research Center. She has served as a member and/or a chair of several national and international committees, including chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), member of the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee (CSAC), member and chair of the section on the sociology of population for the American Sociological Association, member of the PAA’s board of directors, chair of the PAA’s Committee on Population Statistics, and a member of an International Advisory Board of the Swedish Initiative for Research on Microdata in the Social and Medical Sciences. Her main research interests center on socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in health, cognition, and mortality across the life course and demographic estimation of mortality. In recent years, she has extended this focus to include health and mortality among racial/ethnic immigrant subgroups. She is currently the PI of NIA-funded study, Causes of Geographic Divergence in American Mortality Between 1990 and 2015: Health Behaviors, Health Care Access and Migration.