Modeling the impact of racial and ethnic disparities on COVID-19 epidemic dynamics

Here, we fit structured compartmental models to seroprevalence data from New York State and analyze how herd immunity thresholds (HITs), final sizes, and epidemic risk change across groups. Across all models, the burden of infection fell disproportionately on minority populations: in a model fit to Long Island serosurvey and census data, 81% of Hispanics or Latinos were infected when the HIT was reached compared to 34% of non-Hispanic whites. Our findings, which are meant to be illustrative and not best estimates, demonstrate how racial and ethnic disparities can impact epidemic trajectories and result in unequal distributions of SARS-CoV-2 infection.