The COVID Racial Data Tracker advocates for, collects, publishes, and analyzes racial data on the pandemic across the United States. It’s a collaboration between the COVID Tracking Project and the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research.
This project began when Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research, wrote a series of essays in The Atlantic about the urgent need to gather racial and ethnic demographic data to understand the outbreak and protect vulnerable communities.
On April 12, 2020, we started collecting race and ethnicity data from every state that reported it. On April 15, we launched that dataset as the first iteration of the COVID Racial Data Tracker. We update this data twice per week.
About the data
We’ve compiled the race and ethnicity data that states are reporting for several COVID-19 data categories so that other researchers can begin to work with, analyze, and visualize this information. This is a challenging dataset to compile and code. While an increasing number of states and territories are providing race and ethnicity data, that data remains incomplete and inconsistent.
We’re advocating to change that, and you can, too. Our racial data dashboard provides the latest information on who is providing race and ethnicity data, and how complete it is. Check to see whether your state is reporting this data at all, and for what percentage of cases.
Download the data
See our full dataset as a spreadsheet or CSV, and see our latest analysis of this data on our Racial Data Tracker.
Get in touch
We appreciate your feedback at [email protected] as we work toward building a complete dataset and developing new ways to display, share, and visualize it.
Contributors
This tracker would not exist without the dedicated efforts of contributors and volunteers from both the COVID Tracking project team and the Center for Antiracist Research.
Center contributors
- Michael Barry
- Ibram X. Kendi
- Rachel Lee
- Adeline Gutierrez Nuñez
- Christopher Petrella
- Jessica Simes
- Aviva Geiger Schwarz
- Neesha Wadhwa
- Rachel Chanderdatt
Supported by
Our tracker is supported by the Marguerite Casey Foundation.
