Members of Congress have called a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report on the racial and ethnic deaths related to the coronavirus, “lazy.”
According to BuzzFeed, Congress asked the CDC to collect national data on the race and ethnicity of coronavirus cases and deaths and set Wednesday as a deadline.
The director of the CDC, Dr. Robert Redfield, sent the report to Congress on March 15, which includes a link to the CDC’s data on coronavirus cases and deaths in the U.S. However, the data only includes racial and ethnic information on less than half of the country’s 1.7 million positive cases.
The report also includes a page on hospitalizations broken down by race and ethnicity, but that page only includes data from specific network hospitals in 14 states.
Redfield did say in the report that CDC data does suggest “a disproportionate burden of illness and death among racial and ethnic minority groups,” adding that “studies are underway to confirm these data.”
