[ken]

Black people in America have a measurably lower life expectancy than white people [1]. For people born in 2015, it's down to about 5%, but as recently as 1970, it was over 10%. That's a lot of years of life being cut short.

(There are well-known social causes for this which are direct consequences of racism, like access to quality health care, housing, education, credit, etc.)

COVID-19 deaths aren't taking nearly that many years. According to [2] (about 1.5 weeks old), 1 in 1850 (or around 0.05% of) black Americans have died from COVID-19. Even if this continues for the rest of the year, it still can't hold a candle to plain old racism.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2017/015.pdf [2]: https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race

[rabuse]

This doesn't factor in diet and lifestyle choices, which have a very dramatic effect on life expectancy.

[wendyshu]

This is a causal claim but you've only adduced correlations.

[MickerNews]

You can never prove causality.

[Matumio]

All general statements are false.

Joking aside, you can sometimes prove causality. It's just not as easy as proving a correlation. The most broadly accepted method would be a RCT (randomized controlled trial), though it is often unethical or unfeasible.

You can also build on causal assumption that everyone agrees on. (Like: A person's gender cannot be caused by a government policy. A person winning the lottery is not caused by anything other than playing the lottery.) From such knowledge you can build a causal graph, and (in some cases) draw new causal conclusions from statistical data.

Long story short: you cannot just dismiss a correlation as being useless for any proof of causality.

[therealdrag0]

I sympathize with a lot of these problems, but I wonder if the police issue getting all the attention is going to prevent these other issues from getting serious attention. :|