Back

Disparities in COVID-19 Related Mortality in U.S. Prisons and the General Population

Nowotny, K. M.; Cloud, D.; Wurcel, A. G.; Brinkley-Rubinstein, L.

2020-09-18 public and global health Community evaluation
10.1101/2020.09.17.20183392 medRxiv
Show abstract

We provide an analysis of COVID-19 mortality data to assess the potential magnitude of COVID-19 among prison residents. Data were pooled from Covid Prison Project and multiple publicly available national and state level sources. Data analyses consisted of standard epidemiologic and demographic estimates. A single case study was included to generate a more in-depth and multi-faceted understanding of COVID-19 mortality in prisons. The increase in crude COVID-19 mortality rates for the prison population has outpaced the rates for the general population. People in prison experienced a significantly higher mortality burden compared to the general population (standardized mortality ratio (SMR) = 2.75; 95% confidence interval = 2.54, 2.96). For a handful of states (n = 5), these disparities were more extreme, with SMRs ranging from 5.55 to 10.56. Four states reported COVID-19 related death counts that are more than 50% of expected deaths from all-causes in a calendar year. The case study suggested there was also variation in mortality among units within prison systems, with geriatric facilities potentially at highest risk. Understanding the dynamic trends in COVID-19 mortality in prisons as they move in and out of "hotspot" status is critical.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.