Public Transit Use Is Associated With Higher Coronavirus Death Rates, Researchers Find

African-Americans’ greater use of public transportation could partly explain their higher rate of Covid-19 deaths, two studies suggest

By David Harrison of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"African-Americans may be dying at higher rates than white people from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, in part because of black people’s heavier reliance on public transportation for commuting, two new studies by economists suggest.

One of the studies, by University of Virginia economist John McLaren, found that the racial discrepancy remained even after controlling for income or insurance rates. Instead, Mr. McLaren found the gap was due in part to the fact that black workers are more likely to get to work via public transit, including subways and buses.

About 10.4% of black commuters take public transit, versus 3.4% of white commuters, according to the Census. After controlling for the use of public transit, Mr. McLaren finds the racial disparity in Covid-19 deaths is less pronounced.

Both studies raise the possibility that other causes could contribute to the discrepancy in deaths, such as gaps in access to paid sick leave, residential segregation and discrimination in health services. They also cited the higher likelihood that African-Americans work in essential occupations, such as health care, which have required employees to stay on the job through the pandemic.

Black people are more than 3.5 times as likely to die of Covid-19 than white people, and Latino people are nearly twice as likely to die of the disease as white people, according to researchers at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh. Both new studies look at black deaths from the disease as a share of the overall black population rather than as a share of those infected with the disease.

The other study, by Christopher Knittel and Bora Ozaltun, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that a 10% increase in the share of a county’s residents who use public transit versus those who telecommute raised Covid-19 death rates by 1.21 per 1,000 people when looking at counties around the U.S.—or by 0.48 per 1,000 people when focusing only on counties within individual states. In their analysis, the researchers controlled for race, income, age, climate and other characteristics.

In part, that could be because there is something specific about public transit—close proximity to strangers on crowded railcars or buses on a daily basis for extended periods, for instance—that makes people particularly vulnerable to getting sick, wrote Mr. Knittel and Mr. Ozaltun."