Are white Washingtonians dying more from COVID-19? Yes and no. The data is deceptive

The numbers are clear in showing how the COVID-19 pandemic has slammed people of color in Washington harder than it has hit white people.

Most of the numbers, anyway. Black and brown people are being infected and hospitalized at higher rates, but when it comes to the ultimate statistic — death — whites appear more vulnerable than any other group.

At times like this it’s advisable to remember the warning offered by Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

The high percentage of white deaths is a perplexing data point, for sure — one that grabbed our attention early in the outbreak. It might feed a narrative that coronavirus is color blind, wreaking havoc indiscriminately across the racial/ethnic spectrum.

There’s no question that too many people of all backgrounds and skin colors are losing their lives and livelihoods to this scourge: Nearly 3,000 Washingtonians have died, including more than 250 Pierce County residents.

But make no mistake, COVID-19 is taking a heavier toll on some segments of society, including people with less income, education and English-language ability — in short, people who tend to be nonwhite. And that disproportionate toll continues right up to the last breath.

The problem with the raw death statistic is that it doesn’t account for age disparities; the median age of white Americans is 9-to-22 years older than Black, Hispanic/Latinx and other racial/ethnic groups.

Fortunately, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently changed the way it shares death data and started adjusting for age. This is standard practice for measuring disease impact, so it’s odd that the CDC waited so long to do it for this virus.

Pressure from Sen. Elizabeth Warren may have helped. The Massachusetts senator sent a letter to CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield last month, in which she wrote: “by failing to adjust COVID-19 mortality rates by age in its public data releases, the CDC may not be providing an accurate assessment of the increased risk of death and serious illness for communities of color relative to White Americans of the same age.”

Voila! The CDC has now added age to the equation. And it shows the death rates of other racial/ethnic groups are up to 2.8 times higher than for white, non-Hispanic persons.

The Washington Department of Health also provides age-adjusted COVID-19 mortality statistics. It shows a death rate of 29.6 white people per 100,000, the lowest of any group.

But you have to dig to find it in a weekly report. The daily dashboard of state COVID data still gives the deceptive, unadjusted figures: Whites comprise 70 percent of deaths, 68 percent of the population.

Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department shows 73.2 percent of deaths are white people and doesn’t adjust for age. “We don’t have enough data for certain races/ethnicities for this calculation,” TPCHD spokesman Dale Phelps told us in an email. If local coronavirus deaths were adjusted, they’d likely be in line with what the CDC has found, he added.

What we do know is that every category of Black and brown people (with the exception of Asians) is being infected at a rate higher than their share of the Pierce County population.

Blacks account for 10.5 percent of all COVID-19 cases but only 7.1 percent of the population. The impacts are even more out of whack for local Hispanic/Latinx people, who are contracting the virus at nearly double their population level (21.3% vs. 11%) and Native Hawaiian/other Pacific Islanders, who are getting it at more than three times their population (4.9% vs. 1.6%).

While all this might seem like a lot of mind-numbing number crunching, the lesson is important: People of color are at exceptionally high risk and must be targeted with additional resources for everything from education to testing to vaccine distribution.

They fill more low-wage service economy jobs that increase their exposure. They live in more crowded, multifamily settings.

Nonwhite Washingtonians carry a heavy burden as they live with this pandemic — and as they die from it, too.