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Covid inquiry: Sadiq Khan’s warnings about disproportionate impact fell on deaf ears [1]

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Date: 2023-11

It was obvious that Covid was disproportionately affecting people from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds “at an early stage” of the pandemic, mayor of London Sadiq Khan has said.

Giving evidence at the UK Covid inquiry, Khan said the disparity was “clear from a number of metrics”.

“If you see the photographs of the first ten doctors who lost their lives,” he said, “the thing that strikes you is they’re all people of colour.

“In relation to transport workers, I’m afraid in London we lost 105 transport workers… I would write to every transport worker whose details we had, their bereaved families, and I noticed the names I was writing were all ethnic minority names.”

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He added: “I heard stories about Londoners who were Filipinos who thought they had to work in the wards without PPE because their visa could be taken away if they didn’t do so.”

Doctors have said an early lack of understanding about Covid’s impact on minority groups was likely deadly because it meant that public health messaging, for instance, was not adequately tailored.

In early May 2020 Khan said he wrote to then health secretary Matt Hancock about the need for “urgent action to introduce routine ethnic data collection within death registrations in England”.

At the time, the ethnicity of those who died did not appear on their death certificate. Khan had been attempting to understand how different communities were being impacted but “couldn’t be told” because ethnicity data on those who had died was not being collected, he said under questioning.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/covid-19-inquiry-sadiq-khan-matt-hancock-priti-patel-disproportionate-black-asian-minority-ethnic/

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