ANALYSIS: Which groups in the US are still dying of COVID-19-- South still lags in vaccinations

Which Groups Are Still Dying of Covid in the U.S.? Deaths have dropped precipitously since their January peak, but the coronavirus continues to claim several thousand lives per week. The New York Times

Deaths from Covid-19 have dropped 90 percent in the United States since their peak in January, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As the nation reopens and restrictions are lifted, however, the virus continues to kill hundreds of people daily. By late May, there were still nearly 2,500 weekly deaths attributed to Covid-19.

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More than half of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, and it’s the remaining unvaccinated population that is driving the lingering deaths, experts say.

After the first vaccines were authorized for emergency use in December, with priority given to senior populations before younger groups, the share of those dying who were 75 or older started dropping immediately.

In turn, younger populations began to make up higher shares of Covid-19 deaths compared with their shares at the peak of the pandemic — a trend that continued when vaccine eligibility opened up to all adults. While the number of deaths dropped in all age groups, about half of Covid-19 deaths are now of people aged 50 to 74, compared with only a third in December.

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The extent of the drop in deaths, however, is not uniform across the board, and cumulative vaccination rates among Black and Hispanic populations continue to lag behind those of Asian and white populations, according to demographic data released by the C.D.C.

The steepest declines have been with older white patients, and also Asians under 30, a group whose weekly Covid-19 deaths were in the single digits even during the height of the pandemic. ...

The remaining deaths are mainly driven by those who have yet to be vaccinated, Dr. Kuppalli said, describing two main groups within this population: those who choose to not get vaccinated because of misinformation and politicization around the vaccine, and those who remain unvaccinated because of other factors, including access. ...

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