Abstract Body: Introduction: Hypertension is one of the leading causes of mortality. The direction and strength of the association between death from hypertensive and hypertensive renal disease and stroke mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic among different U.S. ethnic groups is unclear.

Hypothesis:
Hypertensive and hypertensive renal disease mortality is positively correlated with increased stroke death overtime during the COVID-19 pandemic. We aim to examine the correlation between mortality from Hypertensive and hypertensive renal disease and stroke before and after the COVID-19 pandemic among U.S. Hispanic and non-Hispanic populations.

Methods: A database query from the U.S. Centers Disease for Control and Prevention (CDC) Wonder was retrieved. A yearly age-adjusted mortality from hypertension or hypertensive renal disease from 2017 to 2022 was correlated with the mortality from stroke by Pearson’s correlation coefficient. Further analyses were performed by stratified data before and after 2019 as well as among Hispanic and non-Hispanic subgroups.

Results: Age-adjusted mortality from hypertension and hypertensive renal disease trended down before the COVID-19 pandemic (from 9 to 8.91 deaths per 100,000 populations) but trended up after the pandemic (from 10.08 to 10.29 deaths per 100,000 populations). A similar trend occurred in age-adjusted mortality from stroke (from 37.59 to 36.59 deaths per 100,000 populations during pre-pandemic and from 38.84 to 39.53 deaths per 100,000 populations during post-pandemic). Those overall cause-specific mortalities are highly correlated with the correlation coefficient of 0.9697 (Figure 1). The correlation remained but slightly attenuated among Hispanics, while more pronounced among non-Hispanics (0.9649 and 0.9680, respectively; Figures 2 and 3). Stratified by time-related to the COVID-19 pandemic, age-adjusted mortality from hypertension and hypertensive renal disease and stroke trended down before the COVID-19 pandemic but trended up after the pandemic. The correlation was 0.9866 before the pandemic and up to 0.9988 during the pandemic (Figures 1, 2, and 3).

Conclusions: Hypertensive and hypertensive renal disease mortality as well as stroke mortality have trended up and increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among the non-Hispanic population. Further investigations are required to mitigate health and ethnic disparities, especially during high demand for limited resources.