Researcher: Elizabeth Wrigley-Field (College of Liberal Arts, Department of Sociology, Minnesota Population Center, Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation)

2020 marked a major upheaval in how racial stratification and neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation (e.g., neighborhood poverty rates) intersect in structuring mortality risk in Minnesota. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, racial stratification in mortality aligned strongly with neighborhood deprivation. The early pandemic changed that. But what has happened since and what is happening now? Has Minnesota returned to its pre-pandemic patterns of inequity, has it maintained the new patterns it developed early in the pandemic, or has something wholly new emerged? And in the era in which the dominant Covid-19 variant is Omicron, vaccines are widespread but unevenly adopted, and much of life has seemingly “returned to normal,” how is mortality risk—from Covid-19 but also from many other causes of death—distributed in Minnesota? The results of this research project can offer concrete guidance about how best to target limited health resources within the state.