Black people four times more likely to die from Covid-19, ONS finds | Society | The Gua... - 0 views
-
Black people four times more likely to die from Covid-19, ONS finds
-
Black people are more than four times more likely to die from Covid-19 than white people, according to stark official figures exposing a dramatic divergence in the impact of the coronavirus pandemic in England and Wales. The Office of National Statistics found that the difference in the virus’s impact was caused not only by pre-existing differences in communities’ wealth, health, education and living arrangements.
-
after other pre-existing factors had been accounted for, and females from those ethnic groups were 1.6 times more likely to die from the virus than their white counterparts.
- ...14 more annotations...
-
The risk of Covid-19 death for people from Chinese and mixed ethnic groups was found to be similar to that for white people.
-
Guardian research last month confirmed suspicions that minority groups faced the greatest risk from the coronavirus and showed that areas with high ethnic minority populations in England and Wales tended to have higher mortality rates in the pandemic.
-
“We cannot ignore how important racial discrimination and racial inequalities, for example, in housing, are, even among poorer socio-economic groups,” she said. “These factors are important but are not taken into account in most statistical modelling of Covid-19 risk factors.”
-
These groups are more likely to work in frontline roles in the NHS in England: nearly 21% of staff are from ethnic minorities, compared with about 14% of the population of England and Wales. Black, Bangladeshi and Pakistani populations have been shown to face higher levels of unemployment and child poverty than white groups.
-
The authors called for further research on the contribution of occupational risk and whether people from BAME backgrounds were placed at increased risk of exposure and infection.
-
“It doesn’t have to be like this. As a society that prides itself on justice and compassion, we can and must do better.”
-
After all these factors were accounted for, Indian men and women were less likely than people from Bangladeshi and Pakistani background to die from Covid-19, but were still 1.3 times and 1.4 times more vulnerable than white people.
-
The ONS also checked to see if, within ethnic groups, socio-economic class made a difference. They found that the differences in risk of Covid-19-related death across ethnic groups were of similar magnitudes within all three socio-economic classes.
-
Some groups may be over-represented in public-facing occupations and could be more likely to be infected by Covid-19 . About 12.8% of workers from Bangladeshi and Pakistani backgrounds work in public-facing transport jobs such as bus, coach and taxi driving, compared with 3.5% of white people. The ONS said it plans to conduct further work to identify occupations that are particularly at risk.
-
Like the ONS data, the study found that people of black and Asian backgrounds were at higher risk of death, and it ruled out the idea that this was largely due to higher rates of underlying medical problems in these groups.
-
To try to understand how much of the difference in Covid-19 morbidity was to do purely with ethnicity, the statisticians adjusted for age as well as region, rural and urban classification, area deprivation, household composition, socio-economic position, highest qualification held, household tenure, and health or disability as recorded in the 2011 census.
-
The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that people from deprived social backgrounds were also at a higher risk, and again this finding could not be explained by other risk factors.
-
The research accounts for health problems reported by people who filled in the 2011 census, but Hanif said differences in the extent of other underlying diseases in different ethnic groups in Britain – so-called co-morbidities – which have not been accounted for by the ONS, may be significant. For example, in the UK people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent are
-
“We have commissioned Public Health England to better understand the different factors, such as ethnicity, obesity and geographical location that may influence the effects of the virus.”