Discovery might be why African Americans suffer more from COVID-19, study says

“COVID-19 is the most thrombotic (clot-producing) disease we’ve ever seen in our lifetime,” Dr. Alex Spyropoulos, a clot specialist and professor at Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York, told the Associated Press this week.

These clots appear to be worse in African Americans with COVID-19, a study finds, and might be why blacks are suffering more than white patients.

A team at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine performed autopsies on 10 African Americans who died from COVID-19. The decedents were men and women ages 44–78, “with cause of death attributed to COVID-19, reflective of the dominant demographic of deaths following COVID-19 diagnosis in New Orleans,” the researchers wrote in their study, which was published in the journal Lancet Respiratory Medicine.

All 10 decedents had at least one underlying condition — high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes and obesity — known to worsen the infection.