Differential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on excess mortality and life expectancy loss within the Hispanic population

Erosion of the Latino Health Advantage in the US

This JAMA Forum discusses the epidemiological and theoretical explanations regarding the erosion of the Latino health advantage in the US and proposes policies to promote Latino immigrant health.

Commentary on "Racial and ethnic diversity in academic nursing leadership: A cross-sectional analysis" by Travers and colleagues (2024)

The purpose of this commentary is to highlight key points made by Travers and colleagues (2024) in their study entitled, "Racial and ethnic diversity in academic nursing leadership: A cross-sectional analysis" and provide additional recommendations for future research and policy related to diversity in academic nursing leadership. While there is a significant underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minoritized populations in academic leadership in nursing, the level of underrepresentation and contributors to underrepresentation are not the same across racial and ethnic minoritized populations. As we design strategies to promote diversity in academic nursing it is important to benchmark efforts to ensure representation from groups who experience the most significant health inequities, create tailored strategies that consider the unique historical and contemporary barriers to leadership in academic nursing across and within minoritized groups, and build upon evidence-based strategies, especially the important role that minority serving institutions have played.

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Excess All-Cause Mortality in the First Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Research on the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has consistently found disproportionately high mortality among ethnoracial minorities, but reports differ with respect to the magnitude of mortality disparities and reach different conclusions regarding which groups were most impacted. We suggest that these variations stem from differences in the temporal scope of the mortality data used and difficulties inherent in measuring race and ethnicity. To circumvent these issues, we link Social Security Administration death records for 2010 through 2021 to decennial census and American Community Survey race and ethnicity responses. We use these linked data to estimate excess all-cause mortality for age-, sex-, race-, and ethnicity-specific subgroups and examine ethnoracial variation in excess mortality across states and over the course of the pandemic's first year. Results show that non-Hispanic American Indians and Alaska Natives experienced the highest excess mortality of any ethnoracial group in the first year of the pandemic, followed by Hispanics and non-Hispanic Blacks. Spatiotemporal and age-specific ethnoracial disparities suggest that the socioeconomic determinants driving health disparities prior to the pandemic were amplified and expressed in new ways in the pandemic's first year to disproportionately concentrate excess mortality among racial and ethnic minorities.