Black Americans most interested in COVID-19 coronavirus news: Study

Black Americans, who have suffered disproportionately from the coronavirus, have shown a more intense interest in news about the pandemic compared to whites.

Those were the consistent findings in a Pew Research Center survey taken in late April when COVID-19 was dominating the news.

For example, 26 percent of blacks reported discussing the virus “almost all the time” with others, compared to 10 percent of whites who say that.

Forty-eight percent of blacks told Pew they were closely following news about the local availability of coronavirus tests, compared to 25 percent of whites. Similarly, almost half of black people questioned (47 percent) said they were following stories about local hospitals closely, while a quarter of whites (24 percent) said the same thing.

Roughly half of blacks had an intense interest in the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths, with 34 percent of whites saying the same thing.

“The differences in these data are particularly striking,” said Amy Mitchell, director of journalism research at Pew.

According to current CDC death statistics, 23 percent of the Americans who have died from COVID-19 deaths were black, though blacks make up only about 13 percent of the US population. About 53 percent of COVID-19 fatalities were white, though whites make up about 60 percent of the US population

The margin of error in Pew’s American News Pathways Project is plus or minus 1.5 percent.