An incomplete count: Hispanics with COVID-19 are missing from the radar
A version of this story originally appeared in Spanish in Qué Pasa.
Since COVID-19 arrived in North Carolina in early March, over 30,000 people have been infected with the virus and more than 900 have died from the disease.
But how many of them are Hispanic?
Although the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services updates daily the number of Hispanics who have been infected or died of COVID-19, the data is incomplete.
And that means health officials and the medical community don’t have sufficient information to completely understand the real impact of the disease in the Hispanic community, where cases have skyrocketed in recent weeks.
So far, only 16 of the 100 counties in the state have made this data public, according to an analysis by Qué Pasa.
William Munn, a political analyst at the North Carolina Justice Center, said that “data by race and ethnicity have been very difficult to find at the state and county levels.”
“Although the most populated counties such as Mecklenburg or Wake do have ethnic data, others do not, and it is very difficult to access them,” said Munn. “Consequently, it is difficult to advocate and inform audiences about the impact on communities.”
Mecklenburg County, which is the epicenter of the pandemic in North Carolina, was one of the first to clarify what percentage of the Hispanic population is infected with the coronavirus. Of the more than 4,350 positive cases, as of June 3, more than 1,630 were people of Hispanic origin.
Just over a week ago, Wake and Durham, two of the counties with the largest Latino population in North Carolina, released this information.
Of the more than 1,900 cases in Wake, about 624 are Latino. But in Durham, Hispanic infection rate went from 34% to 71.34% of cases in the county, according to Durham’s health department.
In Johnston County, Latinos with coronavirus make up 40.2% (199) of the 505 cases reported so far.
The Orange County Health Department released updated numbers on Friday that reveal that Hispanics are 21% of cases there despite being only 8% of the county’s population.
Other counties that have published the number of infections by ethnic groups are Forsyth, with almost 1,000 Latinos infected; Alamance, with a little more than 155 infected Hispanics and Guilford, which until now has almost 168 (13.3) Latinos sick with COVID-19.
The table below lists counties and their Hispanic coronavirus cases given to Qué Pasa, the percentages of their Hispanic population and of Hispanic cases out of all county cases.
This story was originally published June 5, 2020 at 4:40 PM.
