St George’s University at hospital in Tooting appeals for cash to research why more ethnic minority people are dying with coronavirus

By Sian Bayley, Local Democracy Reporter

A hospital is appealing for cash support to find out why four times more black and ethnic minority people have died of coronavirus than white patients.

St George’s University in Tooting has launched a coronavirus action fund to support research into the pandemic, including the impact of the virus on black and ethnic minority people.

Black people are four times more likely to die from Covid-19 than white people, according to Office of National Statistics data.

Some of the difference appears to be down to socio-economic disadvantage – but the risk is still twice as high even when those factors are accounted for.

More details on how coronavirus affects migrant populations such as refugees and asylum seekers is not yet known, because it is not measured in the UK.

Dr Sally Hargreaves is an expert in migrant health and infectious diseases at St George’s University.

Dr Hargreaves is particularly interested in looking at how vaccinations may be rolled-out for migrant populations, who are typically under-immunised groups in Europe.

She said: “We know there aren’t systems in the UK to vaccinate adult migrants – are they going to be incorporated properly into the vaccine response when a vaccine finally becomes available, or is it going to get left behind?”

Dr Hargreaves believes more BAME people have died because these groups did not have complete access to public health messages.

“First generation migrants, certain categories of labour migrants, have less access to health promotion information,” she said.

“When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the UK, Public Health England didn’t translate guidance. It was just in English. Actually it was Doctors of the World, the charity in East London, who translated it into 36 languages and disseminated it to community groups and migrant groups.”

She stressed it was “incredibly difficult” to generalise across different ethnic groups and different migrant groups.

“A consultant in ITU and a migrant working seven-days-a-week in the back of a restaurant are completely different, but we do tend to lump them together in this country.

“We don’t in the UK routinely collect data on migrants – whether someone is foreign-born or not. We only collect data on ethnicity, which is highly limited in what you can do.”

She uses the example of someone who may identify as black African.

“Are you a second generation African whose parents were born here, or are you a newly arrived asylum seeker from Sudan? Your risk factor is going to be completely different,” she said.

“You can’t do anything without data collection. You can’t find answers.

“We need to engage migrant community leaders and to ask them about what they’ve seen in their communities and what they think of the UK approach, public health messaging, what they think about vaccines, and how it has impacted their community.”

To donate go to: https://www.sgul.ac.uk/research/our-impact/coronavirus-action-fund