Black people in the United States experienced 1.63 million excess deaths when compared to white people over a 22-year period, according to a new study published Tuesday.
A Yale-led group of physicians and health equity scholars set out to analyze excess deaths for the U.S. Black population compared to their white counterparts, from 1999 through 2020.
Excess deaths are typically defined as the “difference between the observed numbers of deaths in specific time periods and expected numbers of deaths in the same time periods,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
After analyzing death certificate data released by the CDC between 1999 and 2020, researchers compared the age-adjusted mortality rates between the Black and white populations.
They found that, during the 22-year period, the number of excess deaths among African-Americans initially improved, then stagnated — before substantially worsening in 2020, “indicating a need for new approaches” on how to tackle the issue.
“After a period of progress in reducing disparities, improvements stalled, and differences between the Black population and the White population worsened in 2020,” researchers wrote.
The study, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found that such a higher mortality rate among Black people has led to a cumulative life loss of more than 80 million excess years when compared to white individuals.
Researchers found the main contributor to excess mortality for both men and women was initially heart disease, followed by cancer for men.
But then came the COVID-19 pandemic, a devastating health crisis that disproportionately affected communities of color. The last year included in the study, 2020, saw COVID emerge as the third leading cause of death in the U.S., according to the CDC.
“The abrupt worsening of these disparities in the first year of the pandemic indicates that current efforts to eliminate mortality disparities have been minimally effective and that progress has been fragile,” said César Caraballo, a lead author of the study and a postdoctoral associate at the Yale-based Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE).
The authors of the study said they wanted to highlight the urgent need of ending the crisis of premature deaths among the Black community in the U.S. — and demonstrate that more needs to be done.
“Despite billions of dollars flowing into health care and a lot of rhetoric about health equity, we’re failing to make progress,” said the study’s senior author Harlan Krumholz, according to STAT News.
The cardiologist and professor of medicine at Yale added, “It’s not understood as a national emergency.”