For Whom the Bell Tolls: COVID-19 Death Patterns in California
Los Angeles, California— Report no.7 of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture addresses the effects of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on Latino communities. As of July 8, 2020, a total of 6,519 people in California had died due to COVID-19‒associated conditions. These deaths did not occur randomly in the state’s population. Rather, they occurred more in some racial/ethnic (R/E) populations than in others.
California’s Latino population has suffered the most deaths (2,807) and the American Indian/Alaska Native population the least (23). We would expect more Latino deaths than American Indian ones, due to the simple fact that there are more Latinos in California---a lot more, in fact: there are 15.5 million Latinos in the state, compared to 128,060 American Indians/Alaska Natives.