Our ongoing Color of Coronavirus project monitors how and where COVID-19 mortality is inequitably impacting certain communities—to guide policy and community responses. Last week, the United States’ COVID-19 death toll reached half a million. We have documented the race and ethnicity for 94% of these cumulative deaths in the United States. 6park.com

 6park.com
Even as vaccine distribution ramps up across the U.S., the virus’ recent toll has been devastating for all groups. Our latest update shows death tolls accelerating in the last four weeks compared to the prior period (mostly January 2021), which had also notched record losses until this update exceeded them.  6park.com

 6park.com
The last four weeks have yielded the highest number of new deaths since the start of the pandemic for all groups except Black and Pacific Islander Americans, for whom it was the second most deadly stretch. (Black Americans suffered the greatest losses in the month of April 2020—especially in cities where the pandemic first raged—while Pacific Islanders saw their highest death toll in our Feb. 2 update.) 6park.com

 6park.com
Note that March 3 ends the third deadliest four-week period since the beginning of the pandemic according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project. (The first and second deadliest periods were in January and December, respectively.) Thus, it is likely that some of the apparent increase in deaths reflected below come from reclassification of deaths by race and ethnicity. In fact, over the last four weeks the number of deaths with an unknown race or ethnicity has decreased by more than 13,000.