Opinion: Death by missing data: Uncollected racial and ethnic pandemic data will drive inequities for decades to come

STAT January 30, 2023
Jennifer W. Tsai, Rohan Khazanchi and Emily Laflamme

At every stage of the Covid-19 pandemic, national reporting of racial and ethnic disparities in Covid-19 testing, diagnosis, disease severity, treatment, and vaccination by clinicians, public health organizations, and the media has been marred by frustrating data deficiencies.

How bad has the problem been? Far beyond bad.

In epidemiology research, missing more than 5% of data in a category is significant because, at that level, the missing data can no longer be treated as statistically random, which makes findings gleaned from the analysis become suspect. A whopping 56% of confirmed Covid-19 infections were missing race and ethnicity when first reported in July 2020. In a systematic review published in 2021, researchers had to exclude one-fifth of cross-sectional studies looking at...

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