California's diverse population provides a natural laboratory for understanding how diseases and conditions interact within different racial/ethnic groups. This report seeks to illustrate the differential effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the state's "majority-minority" population and to discuss the resulting implications for public health. Laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases in California (disaggregated by race/ethnicity into mutually exclusive groups) were integrated with their respective population values to create case rates per 100,000 population, categorized by age group and race/ethnicity. The case rates within each non-White population, in almost every age group, were higher than the White Non-Hispanic population, ranging from one-and-a-half to nearly six times as high. Public health prevention measures such as sheltering-at-home rely on standard assumptions and models. The disparity in case rates found here suggests that alternative narratives such as the epidemiology of diversity may inform additional policies or measures.
Keywords: Covid-19; Epidemiology; Morbidity; Race/ethnicity.