People from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) have reportedly been hit harder by Coronavirus infection and fatalities, reports say.
According to Financial Times, BAME makes up about 13 per cent of the UK population but account for a third of virus patients admitted to hospital critical care units.
In the United States, Black Americans represent around 14 per cent of its population but they represent 30 per cent of the total people who have contracted the virus.
This has led into inquiries into why racial minorities are so heavily over-represented among those suffering from Covid-19.
Kamlesh Khunti, professor of primary care diabetes and vascular medicine at Leicester University in the UK said;
When we started to raise the alarm about four weeks ago some people thought it was scaremongering. Now we see that more than 70 per cent of healthcare professionals who have died in the UK have been from Bame backgrounds.
Prof Khunti added;
We in the UK are in a position to alert the world to what is happening.
Similar patterns showing disproportionate numbers of Bame virus victims have emerged in the US and other European countries with large minority populations.
Although Prof Khunti said none had as strong evidence as the UK about overall ethnic patterns of Covid-19.
France, another country with a large Bame proportion, prohibits the gathering of statistics based on ethnicity.
One factor being investigated is comorbidity. Jerome Adams, US surgeon general who is African American, has warned how the community is at greater risk because of higher rates of underlying conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity that make people more vulnerable to Covid-19.
African Americans also tend to be poorer and less able to socially distance because of the type of work they do and where they live.
People from minority communities often live more closely together than in the general population, with extended families mingling in crowded conditions.
They are also more concentrated in public-facing jobs such as transport and delivery, as well as health and social care, where they risk greater exposure to the virus.
Prof Khunti noted that;
For many reasons, people from Bame backgrounds may find it difficult to maintain social distancing.
Many of the same reasons probably explain the high rates of infection in the Somali community in Norway.
They are generally poorer and live in tight family units. Many work as taxi drivers, and could have driven the skiers returning from their Alpine holidays, which was the source of most early cases in Norway.
Trude Margrete Arnesen, a specialist at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, flagged the added difficulty of being able to deliver advice.
She indicated that;
Everybody else is marinated in information on Covid-19 from morning to evening but not groups that do not tune in to mainstream media.
Dr Sheikh-Mohamed, the Oslo doctor, agreed the authorities made a mistake by relying solely on written material that many in the Somali community could not understand.
While genetics has been mentioned as a possible contributing factor that makes some ethnic groups more susceptible to the virus, this explanation was ruled out by Ewan Birney, the director of the European Bioinformatics Institute, part of the European Molecular Biology Lab.
He expressed that;
After the obvious large differences in comorbidities and socio-economic status between ethnic groups, genetic effects — which might have some effect between individuals — are very unlikely to contribute to the average between-group effects.
An international research effort is under way to examine genetic differences that make some people more likely than others to be infected with the virus or to develop severe symptoms.
The UK government has also commissioned several studies to investigate Covid-19 in ethnic minorities, but clear reasons are yet to emerge.
A report from Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has also found out that Black and Asian Britons are two and half times likely to die from Coronavirus than the white British population.
According to the report, this is an analysis of the United Kingdom National Health Service (NHS) records.
IFS revealed that fatalities among Pakistanis were 2.7 times higher, and for people of the Black Caribbean heritage, 1.8 times greater than White Brits.
Many minority groups live disproportionately in cities such as London and Birmingham, which have more COVID-19 cases and put them at risk of infection.
In the study, IFS found out that there is no single explanation for the higher fatalities, but noted that minorities were more likely to be key workers especially in the health sector.
According to the Institute, of all working-age Black Africans, a third are employed in various roles – 50 per cent more than the white British population.
Reports say hospital workers are more vulnerable to the virus because they are repeatedly exposed to the virus than the general public.
Another study have also shown that 63 per cent of the 100-plus health and social care workers who have died from coronavirus were BAME.
The first ten doctors in the UK to die from coronavirus were all of BAME background, with many born overseas.
And almost 50 per cent of all NHS medic and one in five of the health service’s entire 1.3million staff are from ethnic minorities.
The Royal College of Surgeons has said NHS workers from black or ethnic minority groups should be removed from the frontline as more evidence points to them being more vulnerable to the virus.
This comes as new guidance sent by NHS England to hospitals nationwide stated that BAME staff are ‘risk-assessed’ on a ‘precautionary basis’ and should be potentially taken out of high risk areas if they are considered ‘vulnerable’. They should also get priority access to PPE.
However, while admitting that he supports the new advice from NHS England, Professor Mortensen noted that it would inevitably put pressure on other staff.
The UK Government has since launched an urgent inquiry into the alarming statistics.
Regarding the the United States, the numbers are more higher.
More evidently, in New York City, the epicenter of the outbreak in America, Black New Yorkers are dying at twice the rate of their white peers.
Latinos in the city are also succumbing to the virus at a much higher rate than white or Asian New Yorkers.
The same trends can be seen in infection and hospitalization rates, too.
The proportions can change depending on the state, but the trends are consistent anywhere you look: Compared to their share of the population, greater numbers of people of color die than their white neighbors in this pandemic.
Health experts and academics are now searching for clues among the multiple medical, socio-economic, behavioural, cultural, environmental and biological factors that could be driving the association between Covid-19 and ethnicity.
