Overview

To date, COVID-19 has claimed the lives of 449,020 Americans and has infected tens of millions more. In doing so, this massively sweeping pandemic has uncovered systemic flaws leading to the unequal share of burden to be held by racial minorities. In fact, Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans have 1.5x higher infection rates, 4x higher hospitalization, and 2.7x higher death rates than White Americans. Data shows that this disparity exists across all age groups with the potential for furthering devastation in minority communities. Currently, 41% of all new COVID-19 infections are assigned to persons 35-49yrs old. Unfortunately, for 35-44yo Black and Hispanic Americans, they are 8-11x more likely to die following COVID infections compared to their White counterparts. Despite these startling statistics, racial minorities are receiving COVID vaccines at dramatically lower rates, with the majority of states reporting vaccination patterns along lines of race showing a 2-4x higher vaccination rate for White vs Black Americans. The cause of these disparities in outcomes vs intervention is multifactorial due to the compounding issues of lack of access, health care bias, and presence of negative factors impacting social determinants of health largely assigned to Black and Hispanic communities. Knowing that, we aim to investigate whether or not there are racial disparities in medical resource allocation in stroke patients who are COVID-19 positive. This project will use the limited dataset N3C data. The focus will be on ischemic stroke and we will explore if there are particular patterns that suggest the COVID-19 stroke outcomes/treatments and COVID-care patterns differ along lines of race.

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Interns

Ethan Assefa 

University of Virginia, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Psychology  

Esau Hutcherson 

Howard University, Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science 

Suliah Apatira 

Spelman College, Environmental & Health Science Department 

Dahnielle Milton 

Spelman College, Chemistry & Biochemistry Department 

Rehan Javaid 

University of Virginia, School of Engineering & Applied Science, Department of Computer Science 

Mentors

Sucheta Sharma 

Data Scientist, School of Data Science & iTHRIV, University of Virginia

Dr. Andrew Southerland 

Executive Vice Chair, Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, University of Virginia

Donald E. Brown

Senior Associate Dean and Co-Director, School of Data Science, University of Virginia

Stakeholder

Johanna Loomba

Director of Informatics, iTHRIV

Sponsors

Deloitte AI Institute for Government

Oracle for Research