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?:abstract
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INTRODUCTION/OBJECTIVE: An Institute of Medicine (IOM) report from 2002 has documented that racial and ethnic minorities have tended to receive worse health outcomes compared to non-minorities. This pattern has been demonstrated for many chronic and acute injuries and illnesses, but to the author’s knowledge, there is sparse literature on this study on outcomes related to the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). SARS-CoV-2 has become a pandemic of global importance with significant impact on all elements of society. As part of quality assurance, as becoming confirmed positive for SARS-CoV-2 would be adverse clinical news, a review was undertaken to see if there were ethnic differences in the veteran population being tested at the Veteran Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) on the risk of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2. METHODS: As part of a quality assurance/quality improvement project, a manual retrospective review of all SARS-CoV- 2 RT-PCR tests performed at the VAMC from March 11th, 2020 to April 13th, 2020. These tests were reviewed within the computerized medical record system to determine the age, gender, ethnicity of the patients, and test result of the patient. RESULTS: There were 571 patients who had tested for SARS-CoV-2. Out of these patients, 99 of these patients had a positive test result. The ethnic breakdown of the unique patients with a positive test result was 67 were African- American (68% of positive results), 2 Asian-American (2%), 1 Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander/Hispanic mixed (1%), 17 Caucasian (17%), and 12 declined to answer or left ethnic field unanswered. Among the 471 who had negative results, only 197 or 42% were African American and 118 were Caucasian (25%). CONCLUSION: African Americans had more infections with SARS-CoV-2 compared to the other ethnic groups. Caucasians had many of the negative results, and positive results were otherwise not common in the other ethnic groups in the VAMC cohort. Given this first report in the literature of the disproportionate impact SARS-CoV-2 is having on those of African American ethnicity, appropriate clinical access and low threshold to test is essential.
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