COVID-19 Ranks as Third Leading Killer of Americans

"In fact, among nearly all of these ethnic and racial minority groups, the COVID-19-related deaths were more than double the death rate of non-Hispanic white persons,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said during a White House COVID-19 Response Team briefing on the topic. “Sadly, based on the current state of the pandemic, these impacts have remained in 2021, where we continue to see that communities of color account for an outsize portion of these deaths.”

Prioritizing these groups for vaccination and “heavily promoting the vaccine” to disproportionately impacted populations — and especially to workers whose jobs don't allow them to socially distance — is one way to prevent such a pronounced disparity from continuing, Lessler says.

Efforts are underway to vaccinate the country's most vulnerable. In fact, more than 70 percent of people over the age of 65 have received at least one vaccine dose, Walensky confirmed, and mass vaccination sites are being set up in communities hit hardest by the coronavirus. Still, an analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that in many states, minority communities have received shares of the vaccine that are smaller than their shares of COVID-19 cases and deaths and smaller than their shares of the total population. What's more, the vaccination rate among white people is nearly twice as high as the rate for Hispanic people and 1.7 times as high as the rate for Black people.

COVID-19 continues to claim lives

The COVID-19 death count continues to climb. More than 200,000 Americans have lost their lives to the disease since the start of 2021, bringing the pandemic's total to more than 550,000. That's why Lessler predicts that even with effective vaccines, COVID-19 will likely hold a top-10 spot on this year's leading causes of death list.

"But I think in the second half of the year, the most likely scenario is we see [deaths from COVID-19] drop to more of a flu-type of level,” he said. “Still, that is a significant threat to human health, compared to other infectious diseases in the United States.” Between 24,000 and 62,000 Americans died from the flu during the 2019-2020 flu season, the CDC reports.

In addition to the vaccine, health experts say face masks and social distancing can help slow the spread of the coronavirus and protect high-risk individuals from the disease it causes.

"The data should serve, again, as a catalyst for each of us to continue to do our part to drive down cases and reduce the spread of COVID-19 and get people vaccinated as quickly as possible,” the CDC's Walensky said.