COVID-19 MORTALITY IN NEW YORK CITY ACROSS NEIGHBORHOODS BY RACE, ETHNICITY, AND NATIVITY STATUS

ABSTRACT

New York City has lost more lives from covid-19 than any other American city. This study examines variation in covid-19 deaths across neighborhoods as it relates to variation in the racial, ethnic, and nativity-status composition of neighborhoods. This topic has received little scholarly attention and is imperative to explore, given the absence of racial and ethnic specific covid-19 mortality rates by neighborhood. New York City is a racially and ethnically segregated city, and a longstanding destination of immigrants, making some neighborhoods more susceptible to greater levels of covid-19 mortality than others. Using ZCTA-level data on covid-19 deaths and demographic data from the American Community Survey, our descriptive and bivariate choropleth mapping analyses reveal that a racial, ethnic, and nativity-status hierarchy exists in the geographic distribution of covid-19 mortality. Implications of these findings are discussed as they relate to residential segregation and persistent spatial inequalities faced by neighborhoods of color.

Keywords::

• covid-19, residential segregation, racial/ethnic inequality, immigration

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Tabassum Insaf, Assistant Professor of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and Dr. Temilayo Adeyeye, Assistant Research Professor of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, both from the University at Albany, SUNY, for their research assistance and technical advice. We would also like to thank the New York State COVID-19 Minority Health Disparities Team at the University at Albany, SUNY for the valuable input on our presentation of an earlier version of this research. Finally, we acknowledge the very helpful input of the anonymous reviewers that significantly improved this paper.

Notes

¹ Logan and Stults (2011) calculated D-scores based upon tract-level data. D-scores are, however, sensitive to geographic scale, and those based upon larger levels of geography (e.g., tracts versus block groups) tend to be lower in value than D-scores based upon smaller levels of geography (Wong 1997). Notably, New York City has high D-scores even using tracts as the unit of analysis (Massey and Tannen 2015).

² A special tabulation from the U.S. Census Bureau is needed to obtain these data. We cannot aggregate PUMS data because the ZCTA geography is unavailable within the publicly-available PUMS data.

³ For the projection of the maps, we use the UTM standard by New York State (https://gis.ny.gov/coordinationprogram/workgroups/wg_1/related/standards/datum.htm). All publications by the New York State Department of Health and other state agencies use this projection.

⁴ Hereafter, for simplicity, we just refer to non-Hispanic Whites as Whites.

⁵ We limit our analyses to these groups because multivariate analyses in Friedman and others (2021) reveal an association between the percentages of these racial, ethnic, and nativity-status groups and COVID-19 mortality at the ZCTA-level. The maps for foreign-born Whites and Blacks and native-born Hispanics and Asians are available upon request of the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Support for this research was provided by the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis at the University at Albany, SUNY.