Social inequities in the distribution of COVID-19: An intra-categorical analysis of people with disabilities in the U.S.
Jayajit Chakraborty
PMID 32981853WHAT IT FOUND
Counties with higher percentages of people with disabilities who were Black, Asian, Hispanic, non-Hispanic non-White, below poverty, aged 5-17, or female had higher confirmed cases per 100,000 people, while overall disability percentage was lower.
Key findings
01The overall percentage of people with disabilities in a county was weakly and negatively associated with county COVID incidence.
02Counties with higher percentages of people with disabilities who were Black alone, Asian alone, Hispanic, non-Hispanic non-White, below poverty, or aged 5-34 had positive and significant associations with county COVID incidence.
03After accounting for geographic clustering, higher percentages of Hispanic, non-Hispanic non-White, below-poverty, 5-17-year-old, and female people with disabilities were positively associated with county COVID incidence, while non-Hispanic White, above-poverty, older, and male percentages were negatively associated.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study analyzed counties, not individual people, so it cannot show whether a person with a disability was more likely to catch COVID. The disability data came from a 2018 survey of civilian non-institutionalized people, excluding people in institutions and limiting the types of disability measured. The paper's written race-model result contradicts Table 2, so the direction for race-specific disability percentages is uncertain. It did not include data on testing, access to care, or other factors that could explain county differences. The data were a snapshot as of August 1, 2020, and county incidence varied widely.
Declared interests
This research was funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation Geospatial Fellows program under grant number 1743184. The author reported no conflicts of interest or disclosures.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as showing that an individual person with a disability was more likely to catch COVID. The study compared county-level percentages, not individual cases, and the overall county disability percentage was negatively associated with incidence.