A Research Note on Community Resilience Estimates: New U.S. Census Bureau Data With an Application to Excess Deaths From COVID-19

In this research note, we describe the results of the first validation study of the U.S. Census Bureau's new Community Resilience Estimates (CRE), which uses Census microdata to develop a tract-level vulnerability index for the United States. By employing administrative microdata to link Social Security Administration mortality records to CRE, we show that CRE quartiles provide more stable predictions of COVID-19 excess deaths than single demographic categorizations such as race or age, as well as other vulnerability measures including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency's National Risk Index (NRI). We also use machine learning techniques to show that CRE provides more predictive power of COVID-19 excess deaths than standard socioeconomic predictors of vulnerability such as poverty and unemployment, as well as SVI and NRI. We find that a 10-percentage-point increase in a key CRE risk measure is associated with one additional death per neighborhood during the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States. We conclude that, compared with alternative measures, CRE provides a more accurate predictor of community vulnerability to a disaster such as a pandemic.