Black Medicare Patients With COVID-19 Nearly 4 Times As Likely To End Up In Hospital

New federal data reinforces the stark racial disparities that have appeared with COVID-19: According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Black Americans enrolled in Medicare were hospitalized with the disease at rates nearly four times higher than their white counterparts.

The data "confirms long understood and stubbornly persistent disparities in health outcomes for racial and ethnic minority groups," Verma said in a press briefing Monday.

Previous data has already shown that older Americans in general are more likely to develop severe cases of COVID-19; but the new CMS data highlights that, even among this group, racial and health disparities are dramatic.

Overall, more than 325,000 Medicare beneficiaries were diagnosed with COVID-19 during the time period covered — from Jan. 1 through May 16, 2020 — and nearly 110,000 were hospitalized for treatment for the disease.

For example, one study, published in May and based off patient records in a large California health care system, found that African-Americans are 2.7 as likely as white people to end up hospitalized with the disease.