Black women 3 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than White men

Since the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic, it's been widely believed that men are more likely to die of COVID-19 than women. Now, research is challenging the notion that the likelihood of dying of the disease largely comes down to biology, finding that coronavirus mortality rates for Black women in the U.S. are more than three times that of White and Asian men. 

Black women in the U.S. are dying from the virus at a higher rate than any other group, male or female, except Black men, according to an analysis of COVID-19 mortality patterns by race and gender in Georgia and Michigan published this week in the Journal of Internal Medicine.  "The deaths we see in the pandemic reflect pre-existing structural inequities; after the pandemic is gone, those will still be there," Heather Shattuck-Heidorn, assistant professor of gender and women studies at the University of Maine and the study's senior author, told CBS MoneyWatch.