(Press-News.org) While Black, Hispanic, Latino, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander people are more likely to die of COVID-19 than white people nationwide, a recent study from Oregon State University found the risk was even greater for racial and ethnic minority groups living in rural areas compared with urban areas.
To address the disparities, researchers say the health care response to COVID-19, including the vaccine rollout, needs to allocate additional resources to rural areas that have been hardest hit, especially those where minority populations are concentrated.
Earlier studies throughout the U.S. have shown that social determinants of health like poverty, access to reliable health care, chronic health conditions and type of occupation contribute to increased risk of COVID-19 infection and fatality for racial and ethnic minorities.
But living in a rural area on top of being a member of a racial minority group acts as a "double whammy," said Kwadwo Boakye, co-author on the study and a doctoral student focusing on epidemiology in OSU's College of Public Health and Human Sciences.
"It would not be ideal to say that 'rural versus urban' is a standalone thing. It has to be intertwined with the racial and ethnic disparity as well," to account for the disparate risk levels, Boakye said.
The study, published in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, examined case fatality ratios during the period of Jan. 1 through Dec. 18, 2020. Researchers found that in that time, people living in "mostly rural" and "completely rural" counties who contracted COVID-19 were 15-26% and 15-24%, respectively, more likely to die from it than people in "mostly urban" counties who contracted the virus.
When researchers broke the results down by race, they found that the more rural a county was, as determined by census data, the higher the case-fatality ratio was for minority groups, especially for Black, Hispanic and Latino people. American Indian and Asian/Pacific Islander people also saw an increased case-fatality ratio in more rural counties.
In rural areas around the country, researchers noted that counties with larger percentages of Black, Hispanic/Latino and Asian/Pacific Islander people had clusters of higher COVID-19 case fatality.
"Generally, minorities are on the lower end of the spectrum for socioeconomic status. This may result in a need for them to work in occupations where they're in contact with a lot of other people, which puts them in more circumstances that are more prone to the spread of the virus," Boakye said.
In rural areas, most blue collar jobs are in agriculture, which means workers can't work from the safety of home during a pandemic, he said.
This study highlighted the impact that socioeconomic disparities and structural racism have had on health outcomes for racial and ethnic minorities over the decades, Boakye said.
"We are seeing with the COVID pandemic that minorities are at a larger risk of getting the disease, and also have a higher risk of mortality from the disease compared to other ethnic groups," he said.
"Compare living in a rural area, where you don't have a state-of-the-art medical facility with plenty of ventilators, to someone who is living in the city, who has access to all those facilities. We need health care facilities in these rural areas," Boakye said. "Policies should prioritize rural health and the adequate distribution of health resources to meet the needs of the minority populations, especially the distribution of COVID-19 vaccinations."
The researchers added that they were limited by the census data available; if they had been able to parse the numbers on an individual level, rather than aggregate, they could have obtained more specific results.
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The study was co-authored by Ayodeji Iyanda and Yongmei Lu from Texas State University and Joseph Oppong from the University of North Texas.
EUGENE, Ore. -- April 16, 2021 -- University of Oregon physicists have developed a new method to manipulate sound -- stop it, reverse it, store it and even use it later -- in synthetic composite structures known as metamaterials.
The discovery was made using theoretical and computational analysis of the mechanical vibrations of thin elastic plates, which serve as the building blocks for the proposed design. The physicists, Pragalv Karki and Jayson Paulose, also developed a simpler minimal model consisting of springs and masses demonstrating the same signal manipulation ability.
"There have been a lot of mechanisms that can guide or block the transmission of sound waves through a metamaterial, but our design is the first to dynamically stop and reverse a sound pulse," said Karki, ...
NEW YORK, NY (April 16, 2021)--SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, likely does not directly infect the brain but can still inflict significant neurological damage, according to a new study from neuropathologists, neurologists, and neuroradiologists at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.
"There's been considerable debate about whether this virus infects the brain, but we were unable to find any signs of virus inside brain cells of more than 40 COVID-19 patients," says James E. Goldman, MD, PhD, professor of pathology & cell biology (in psychiatry), who led the ...
Understanding the components that control cell division is fundamental to understanding how life works and how alterations in this delicate process can cause diseases such as cancer. It was precisely the discoveries of "key regulators of the cell cycle" and their implications for processes such as cancer, that won the British scientists R. Timothy Hunt and Paul M. Nurse and the American scientist Leland H. Hartwell the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. A study led by Óscar Fernández-Capetillo, Head of the Genomic Instability Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) and published this week in The EMBO Journal uncovers a new cell cycle control element, the USP7 protein. It acts as a brake to prevent cells ...
Researchers from the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their collaborators have recently made great progress in the study of the stellar beta-decay rate of 59Fe, which constitutes an important step towards understanding 60Fe nucleosynthesis in massive stars. The results were published in Physical Review Letters on April 12.
Radioactive nuclide 60Fe plays an essential role in nuclear astrophysical studies. It is synthesized in massive stars by successive neutron captures on a stable nucleus of 58Fe and, during the late stages of stellar evolution, ejected into space via a core-collapse supernova.
The characteristic gamma lines associated with the decay of 60Fe have been detected by space gamma-ray detectors. By comparing the 60Fe ...
The first photosynthetic oxygen-producing organisms on Earth were cyanobacteria. Their evolution dramatically changed the Earth allowing oxygen to accumulate into the atmosphere for the first time and further allowing the evolution of oxygen-utilizing organisms including eukaryotes. Eukaryotes include animals, but also algae, a broad group of photosynthetic oxygen-producing organisms that now dominate photosynthesis in the modern oceans. When, however, did algae begin to occupy marine ecosystems and compete with cyanobacteria as important phototrophic organisms?
In a new study Zhang et al use the molecular remains of ancient algae (so-called biomarkers) to show that algae occupied an important ...
It is always exciting to find new isotopes with extreme neutron/proton numbers in nuclear physics research. In the region of heavy nuclei, α-decay is one of the pervasive decay modes and plays an essential role in searching for new isotopes. However, even after about a century of studying α-decay, scientists still cannot perfectly describe how the α-particle is formed at the surface of the nucleus before its emission.
In the α-decay process, the α-particle can be regarded not only as two protons plus two neutrons, but also as two proton-neutron pairs. Although previous studies have proved the importance of the pairing forces between the identical nucleons, it remains unclear whether ...
Older adults are more willing to make an effort to help others than younger adults, according to new research from the University of Birmingham.
The study, led by researchers in the University's School of Psychology, is the first to show how effortful 'prosocial' behaviour - intended to benefit others - changes as people get older. In particular, it focused on people's willingness to exert physical effort, rather than to give money or time, since attitudes to both these are known to change with age. The research results are published in Psychological Science.
In the study, the research team tested a group of 95 adults aged between 18 and 36, and a group of 92 adults aged 55-85. Each participant made 150 choices about whether or not to grip a handheld ...
WASHINGTON, April 16, 2021 -- Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors recognized that patients who developed a "cytokine storm" -- a surge of pro-inflammatory immune proteins -- were often the sickest and at highest risk of dying. But a cytokine storm can also occur in other illnesses, such as influenza. Today, scientists report preliminary results on a sweat sensor that acts as an early warning system for an impending cytokine storm, which could help doctors more effectively treat patients.
The researchers will present their results today at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2021 is being held online April 5-30. Live sessions will be hosted April 5-16, ...
Encoding information into light, and transmitting it through optical fibers lies at the core of optical communications. With an incredibly low loss of 0.2 dB/km, optical fibers made from silica have laid the foundations of today's global telecommunication networks and our information society.
Such ultralow optical loss is equally essential for integrated photonics, which enable the synthesis, processing and detection of optical signals using on-chip waveguides. Today, a number of innovative technologies are based on integrated photonics, including semiconductor ...
Researchers at Aalto University have developed a new device for spintronics. The results have been published in the journal Nature Communications, and mark a step towards the goal of using spintronics to make computer chips and devices for data processing and communication technology that are small and powerful.
Traditional electronics uses electrical charge to carry out computations that power most of our day-to-day technology. However, engineers are unable to make electronics do calculations faster, as moving charge creates heat, and we're at the ...
