Why COVID-19 Caused so Many Deaths in the Latinx Community?

A Conversation with Dr. Reanne Frank

by Jessica Rivera, PhD

This past spring, I came across an article on the OSU home page titled Many Hispanics died of COVID-19 because of work exposure. I knew the impact of the pandemic had significantly affected the Latinx community, but I didn’t know the extent of this impact. Although it was upsetting news to read, I was hopeful that a professor on campus was conducting research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Latinx community. Here is my interview with Dr. Reanne Frank, a professor in sociology at OSU.

How did you become interested in sociology?

I grew up in Detroit in the 70’s and 80’s when the city was being gutted -the auto industry was in crisis and there was continued white flight out of the city. I was observing firsthand how racism operates and how devastating its effects can be on such a large scale. That set me up with a sociological frame of mind. When I started to learn about sociology in college it helped me understand the underlying structural issues of what I had observed as a child. Can you tell me a little more about your COVID study on Latinx deaths?

What sparked your interest to do research on immigration and the Latinx community?

I also became interested in immigration when I was young. The Detroit public school I went to, had an international component. There were smaller immigrant populations in my school’s neighborhood back then but some of my classmates were new Americans. The particular neighborhood my school was located had the small pockets of immigrants, alongside internal migrants such as low-income White people from Appalachia, and a large established Black population, which made for an interesting demographic mix for Detroit at the time. After college I attended the University of Texas at Austin and because of my interest in immigration, I ended up working in the population center. That’s where I discovered demography and really liked that it gave me the tools to describe population level processes. When we’re trying to understand really complicated issues like societal inequalities and racism, you need to spend time to describe the population that these inequalities are affecting and how they’re being affected. For me this was very illuminating and ever since then I defined myself as a social demographer.

I previously worked with my collaborator D. Phuong (Phoenix) Do on work around racial residential segregation. At the beginning of the pandemic, she started downloading various databases. It was tricky publishing during

COVID because everything was happening fast, and patterns were changing quickly in terms of what was happening and what data was available to capture what was happening.

It was clear that there were pronounced racial disparities of who was getting sick with COVID and dying. Much of the commentary around the high deaths of minorities, and the Latinx population in particular, often tied the deaths to pre-existing conditions or other sorts of individual-level risk factors. I remember a spokesperson for a meatpacking plant tried to blame the high deaths on living arrangements. However, it was really clear that people were getting COVID at work, and they were not being provided with protections against the virus. We know that the US occupational landscape is racialized and racial ethnic minorities, particularly the Latinx population, are disproportionately employed in front line and essential industries that don’t have good worker protections. That needs to be the first thing that people think about where they’re trying to understand what is going on with higher COVID-19 burdens, instead of a list of co-morbidities, blaming living arrangements or cultural factors. We set out to take a closer comparative look at COVID-19 cases and deaths by age groups for the Latinx population and found that working age Hispanics (30-64) suffered far greater infection and death rates than whites in the same age group, a fact that had been hidden in looking just at overall death rates that had not been age-standardized. In fact, we found that whites were the most underrepresented in case burden among the working-age population. Of course, for a lot of community members, the fact that the Latinx community died at higher rates was not anything new. There was a symposium at Ohio State in Spring 2021 called “Bringing the Border to Columbus”. At this symposium Dr. Elena Foulis and several students performed oral narratives on COVID. The performance really stuck with me. Specifically, the first words that were shared:

Somos la comunidad que ha muerto mas, que ha muerto at a higher rate because we have no other choice, because we don’t have the privilege to stay home for two weeks and not have to work, we don’t have it, we never had it, and we won’t have it any time soon.

It was striking to me to hear someone had clearly articulated what we found in the data, but of course, the people who are experiencing it and living it, knew it.

Professor Dr. Reanne Frank, Department of Sociology