The government will launch a review into the disproportionate impact of coronavirus on people from black, Asian and minority ethnic (Bame) backgrounds, Downing Street has confirmed.
NHS bosses will consider evidence that Bame patients are more likely to die from Covid-19 following growing concern over whether certain communities are being disproportionately affected by the disease.
Asked if there was going to be a review, the prime minister’s official spokesman said: “Yes, that work is going to happen.
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“We have asked the NHS and Public England to be in the lead.”
It comes after calls from Labour for a probe into why people from ethnic minorities might be more vulnerable to the disease, following a “deeply disturbing” number of deaths of Bame doctors.
A report by the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre on the first 3,883 patients critically ill with coronavirus found that over a third were non-white (33.6 per cent), compared with 18 per cent of the UK population.
The first 10 UK doctors who died from the coronavirus were all from Bame backgrounds. Around 44 per cent of NHS medical staff are from ethnic minorities.
The medics who have died so far include Abdul Mabud Chowdhury, a 53-year-old urologist from east London, Amged El-Hawrani, a 55-year-old consultant in the Midlands, Sudanese organ transplant consultant Adil El Tayar, 63, and 68-year-old Dr Alfa Saadu, who returned from retirement to help out at a hospital in Hertfordshire.
Dr Chaand Nagpaul, the chair of the British Medical Association, has led calls for a review into the disproportionate numbers of deaths among doctors from a Bame background.
“At face value, it seems hard to see how this can be random – to have the first 10 doctors of all being of Bame background,” he previously told The Guardian.
“Not only that, we also know that in terms of the Bame population, they make up about a third of those in intensive care. There’s a disproportionate percentage of Bame people getting ill.
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“We have heard the virus does not discriminate between individuals but there’s no doubt there appears to be a manifest disproportionate severity of infection in Bame people and doctors.”
Meanwhile, a recent poll for The Independent revealed that people from Bame background were being hit harder by lockdown measures, with Bame households almost twice as likely as white Britons to report having lost income and jobs.
Pollsters BMG found that 46 per cent of Bame people said that their household income had reduced as a result of coronavirus, against 28 per cent of white British families.
Around 15 per cent of respondents from ethnic minorities said they had lost their job, compared with 8 per cent of white Britons.
