Improved measurement of racial/ethnic disparities in COVID-19 mortality in the United States.

Different estimation methods produce diverging accounts of racial/ethnic disparities in COVID-19 mortality in the United States. The CDC's decision to present the racial/ethnic distribution of COVID-19 deaths at the state level alongside re-weighted racial/ethnic population distributions -- in effect, a geographic adjustment -- makes it seem that Whites have the highest death rates. Age adjustment procedures used by others, including the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, lead to the opposite conclusion that Blacks and Hispanics are dying from COVID-19 at higher rates than Whites.