Is there anything true in what the government and its media scribes say, about anything? Not so far, but there’s always next century.
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media Bullshit meter
Excerpts:
The claim that COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted people of color is often heard and rarely, if ever, disputed. It is one of many instances where politicians and activists identify “white privilege” and use that concept as a basis for policy.
Here in Minnesota, it has been widely reported that minorities, and especially blacks, have suffered from COVID to an extent several times greater than whites. This claim, frequently repeated and never questioned in the press, has been the basis for potentially discriminatory actions by the Walz administration. But is the assertion of disproportionate impact true?
In December 2020, a group of sociologists and others at the University of Minnesota produced a study that gave initial impetus to the idea that COVID devastated minority communities. Its sensational conclusion was that black Minnesotans died from COVID at a rate more than five times that of white Minnesotans, while latinos in Minnesota died from COVID at a rate more than four times that of whites, when adjusted for age.
This startling conclusion garnered considerable publicity, all of it uncritical. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota donated $5 million to the University of Minnesota to establish a Center for Antiracism Research and Health Equity. In announcing this grant, the university’s press release said, “During the pandemic, Black Minnesotans are dying from COVID-19 at a rate five times higher than white Minnesotans when adjusted for age.” ….
Can that claim possibly be true? The sociologists’ study itself acknowledged obvious facts to the contrary:
“Non-Hispanic white Minnesotans account for about 80 percent of the state’s population and about 82 percent of its COVID-19 deaths. This seeming lack of disparity may be surprising, especially at a time when Minnesota has received national attention for its deep racial divide following the police killing of George Floyd.”
So if whites represented 80 percent of Minnesotans and 82 percent of COVID deaths, as of the date of the study, how was COVID killing blacks and latinos at levels several times greater than whites?
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As of June 3, the MDH dashboard shows that 6,188 whites have died from COVID, representing 0.139 percent of the white population. Among “Latinx,” the totals are 81 deaths, or 0.072 percent of that population. Among blacks, the numbers are 368 deaths or 0.100 percent of the black population. As for Asians, 288 have died with COVID listed on their death certificates, representing 0.101 percent of Minnesota’s Asian population. And finally, 101 Native Americans have died from or with COVID, or 0.169 percent of that population.
In other words, MDH’s own records indicate that Native Americans and whites have disproportionately died from COVID, with blacks, Hispanics and Asians dying at lesser rates. In particular, whites, 80 percent of Minnesota’s population, are now over-represented with 88 percent of COVID deaths.
There is no mystery as to why this is true. Minnesota’s white population skews older than most minority populations, and COVID is overwhelmingly a disease that is dangerous to the elderly, especially those who are already sick. This basic demographic fact explains why COVID has impacted white Minnesotans to a greater extent than minority groups whose populations are, on the average, younger.
The data compiled by MDH obviously don’t support the “racism” narrative favored by the Walz administration, so the Department of Health has promoted “age adjusted” COVID death calculations. On an “age adjusted” basis, MDH claims that all of the minority groups have higher COVID death rates than whites, with blacks at a ratio of about two and one-half to one.
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Despite the obvious flaws in the methods used both by university sociologists and the state Department of Health, and despite the undeniable fact that Minnesota’s whites have died from COVID at a rate greater than their share of the population, the press has uncritically parroted these groups’ claims of racial disparity.
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Race is not a risk factor for COVID. Apart from random variation, the reason for modest differences in COVID mortality among various groups is that the actual risk factors for the disease — age, of course, but also obesity, diabetes, hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and so on — are not uniformly distributed through the population. The Walz administration’s misguided obsession with race is one reason why it performed poorly at publicizing the real COVID risk factors and taking practical actions to protect the most vulnerable Minnesotans.
PSAKING BACK: True: 58% agree media are the “enemy of the people”, 83% hit fake news.
