Data Science Proved What Pittsburgh’s Black Leaders Knew: Racial Disparities Compound Covid Risk

Data Science Proved What Pittsburgh’s Black Leaders Knew: Racial Disparities Compound Covid Risk

The ferocity of the covid-19 pandemic did what Black Pittsburgh — communities that make up a quarter of the city’s population — thought impossible. It shook the norms.

Black researchers, medical professionals and allies knew that people of color, even before covid, experienced bias in public health policy. As the deadly virus emerged, data analysts from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, foundation directors, epidemiologists and others pooled their talents to configure databases from unwieldy state data to chart covid cases.

Their work documented yet another life-threatening disparity between white and Black Pittsburgh: People of color were at higher risk of catching the deadly virus and at higher risk of severe disease and death from that infection.