UK coronavirus live: black people four times more likely to die from coronavirus than whites – ONS
Passengers travelling through Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands airports will be required to cover their faces and wear gloves from Thursday, owner Manchester Airports Group (MAG) has announced.
The firm said the move was designed to ensure that the small number of passengers currently making essential journeys through its airports feel safer and more confident about flying, as well as providing a further level of protection to colleagues working at the airport. It added:
MAG also believes that the new guidelines represent a first step towards demonstrating ways in which air travel can be safe when more passengers start travelling again.
From the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg
Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak)
The statement from Boris Johnson on the route out of lockdown will be at 7pm on Sunday
Sarwar, whose father, Mohammad Sarwar, was the UK’s first Muslim MP, said:
These stark findings will cause considerable alarm in ethnic minority communities across the UK. Given the data from England and Wales, it’s now imperative for the Scottish government to record, study and publish the coronavirus impact on Scotland’s BAME community.
While Scotland’s BAME population may be smaller than in England, ethnic minorities make up a large proportion of those on the frontline in Scotland – in our NHS, care homes and shops. We know that a huge number of deaths in the medical profession involve ethnic minority workers.
Scotland’s ethnic minority communities deserve to know whether they are at a greater risk from Covid-19 and, if so, what steps can be taken to prevent further loss of life.
There are many reasons for thinking that the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis has been, as policy types might put it, “sub-optimal”. But there is no evidence that this is having any impact (yet?) on the government’s standing with the electorate. YouGov has published its latest poll this morning and it shows the Conservatives on 50%, ahead of Labour on 30%.
Latest YouGov polling. Photograph: YouGov
The RHS shares its thanks to NHS and carers with dedicated lawn art outside the Laboratory at RHS Garden Wisley, near Woking, Surrey. Photograph: Steve Parsons/PA
Ethnic minorities’ war and postwar efforts and sacrifices were erased from the national narrative. Today, as our doctors and nurses give their lives, we cannot have a repeat – their stories must be central to how we reshape Britain’s shared future and identity, writes Guardian columnist Afua Hirsch.
It’s beyond ironic that black and Asian people in Britain underpinned the creation of the institutions that so often define Britishness, not least the NHS. Yet that same postwar era also laid the foundations for the inadequate access to healthcare, housing and secure labour that must be part of the reason why minorities are so disproportionately affected by today’s coronavirus crisis.
And we now witness the remarkable full circle of Britain recruiting foreigners to carry out essential work, whether in agriculture or the NHS. It’s just like the last time – when Enoch Powell was among the first to ask Caribbean nurses to come and work in the NHS before turning to race hate. But this time it’s taking place quietly, so we can continue the national pastime of deluding ourselves that Britain can survive without immigrants, while our very survival depends on their labour.
The difference between this moment and the social contract of 75 years ago, is that this time the service and sacrifice of ethnic minority people in Britain is impossible to ignore. It’s clear that racial injustice deserves a central place in our new settlement.
Bob Seely, the MP for the Isle of Wight, has just told Sky News that around 30% of people living on the island have already downloaded the government’s contact-tracing app, which is being piloted there. He said that was a remarkable take-up given that ordinary residents are only being invited to download it from today. Earlier in the week key workers were asked to sign up. But Seely said people started downloading it anyway.
Alongside its main report on coronavirus deaths and ethnicity (see 9.41am and 10.33am), the ONS has also published what it calls a technical appendix, explaining in detail how social factors help to explain why BAME people are more at risk of coronavirus deaths.
It gets quite technical, but it is worth reading if you want to understand this in more detail. Here is an extract.
Another indicator of social disadvantage is living in an overcrowded household (defined as having fewer bedrooms than needed to avoid undesirable sharing). Analysis of the English Housing Survey showed that between 2014 and 2017, around 679,000 (3%) of the estimated 23 million households in England were overcrowded; however, there were marked contrasts between ethnic groups. While only 2% of White British households experienced overcrowding, it was 30% of Bangladeshi households (the highest percentage), 16% of Pakistani households and 12% of black households.
There is also a contrast in the propensity to live in a multi-family household. An unpublished analyses of Labour Force Survey data showed that in 2018, those with a Bangladeshi and Pakistani ethnicity were much more likely than any other ethnic group to live in a multi-family household …
Occupations involving close contact with the public are deemed to be a risk factor for Covid-19 infection. Figure 1 shows how ethnicities are distributed when working in occupations classified to the transport and drivers and operatives standard occupational classification sub-major group, which encompasses bus, coach and taxi drivers and those driving other types of industrial and agricultural vehicles.
And this is figure 1, showing that more than 10% of Bangladeshi and Pakistani people work as bus or taxi drivers, or in similar transport jobs – a far higher proportion than for other ethnic groups.
Proportion of different ethnic groups working as drivers or in other transport jobs Photograph: ONS
Sir Harry Burns, Scotland’s former chief medical officer, has warned against relaxing the lockdown until the community rate of transmission for the coronavirus, known as R, has fallen below 0.5.
Burns, who advised Scottish ministers during the swine flu pandemic in 2009, told MSPs on the Scottish parliament’s new Covid-19 committee he had been told the R rate in Scotland was about 0.7 and said he feared it would rise once the lockdown was eased.
Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, is resisting a relaxation too early, and has said Scotland’s R rate may be slightly higher than in England.
Burns told the committee:
I would expect [the R number] to go up when we ease lockdown because people will be getting together, unless we have a very effective trace and isolation and approach.
I would probably like it to be a bit less than .7 because it’s going to oscillate a bit and it will go up. It would be nice for it to be below .5 but that might be asking a bit much.
He said some people were at increased risk of being infected, particularly people who lived in crowded high rises and used shared lifts. Wealthier people in the suburbs with private gardens will be less exposed. That meant the R rate would be higher in crowded urban areas.
Burns added that he was also “leery” about lifting the lockdown too early because there were clear risks transmission rates would surge. As the sole carer for his 96-year-old mother, who was shielding at home, he already avoided shops and public spaces to lower the chance he catches the virus. He said:
So I understand why people are concerned [about lifting lockdown] and I share their concerns, so we need to tread very carefully.
The UK economy could shrink by 14% and unemployment could more than double as the pandemic causes the deepest recession in modern history, the Bank of England has warned.
Leaving interest rates on hold at a record low of 0.1% as the economic crisis unfolds, the central bank said economic activity across the country had fallen sharply since the onset of the global health emergency and the lockdown measures to contain its spread.
In a warning over the mounting damage to the economy, the Bank said GDP could plunge by 25% in the second quarter. For 2020 as a whole, the economy could shrink by 14%, marking the deepest recession for more than three centuries.
As Boris Johnson prepares to announce the government’s plan to gradually ease lockdown measures after more than a month of sweeping controls on social and business life, the BoE said it would take a year for the economy to return to normal and there were heightened risks of long-term damage.
For more on this story and for all the latest economic news and analysis, head over to our colleague Graeme Wearden’s business live blog.
This is from David Lammy, the shadow justice secretary, on the ONS report into coronavirus deaths and ethnicity.
David Lammy (@DavidLammy)
Appalling. It is urgent the causes of this disproportionality are investigated. Action must be taken to protect black men and women – as well as people from all backgrounds – from the virus. t.co/xpgvofHlZA
Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, arriving at Downing Street this morning ahead of a cabinet meeting.
Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA
This is from Nick Stripe, head of health analysis at the Office for National Statistics, explaining to the BBC what its report on coronavirus deaths and ethnicity (see 9.41am and 10.33am) shows.
Your probability of dying with Covid is made up of two things, firstly your probability of actually being infected in the first place and then secondly, your probability of dying once you have been infected.
Now those two things are influenced by your personal circumstances to a large degree, so the first thing we did is, we looked at adjusting for age, what the difference was of dying to these ethnic groups and that brought out some quite stark differences.
So just adjusting for age, we saw that the black ethnic grouping was just over four times more likely to die of Covid-related issues than the white group, the Bangladeshi and Pakistani grouping was about 3.5 times more likely and the Indian grouping about 2.5 times more likely.
Those figures are just when we adjust for age, but we know other circumstances matter, so we want to try and introduce those other circumstances, which we can do, because we have geographical location from the death certificate and the death registration.
So we know for example, big cities like London, Birmingham and Manchester have been more affected, we know from figures that we released last Friday that whether you’re in an urban or rural area matters, your area’s relative level of deprivation matters, so there’s really a strong social gradient to mortality rates generally, and even more for Covid.
So we needed to adjust for those other factors as well, so geography is a key one and then other socio-economic factors, we could get data from the census records that we’ve linked the deaths to, so things like people’s qualifications, people’s housing circumstances, what type of jobs or occupations they had and their self-reported health.
When we adjust for all those other things, then actually those rates come down significantly, a lot of the difference can be explained by these geographical and socio-economic factors.
Once we’ve adjusted for that, the black ethnic group is now about 90% or 1.9 times more likely to die from Covid-related issues, Bangladeshi and Pakistani males are about 80% more likely, females about 60% more likely and Indian females are about 40% more likely and males about 30% more likely.
The ONS has also published a report this morning on coronavirus and the economy. As PA Media reports, it says almost a quarter of UK firms have halted trading due to the coronavirus lockdown. The PA report goes on:
The ONS said 23% of businesses have temporarily closed or paused trading, according to its latest survey on the business impact of coronavirus, for the two weeks to April 19.
It said the accommodation and food service sector was the worst hit, with 81% of firms halting operations, while the arts and entertainment sector saw 80% cease trading.
Most businesses across all sectors have continued to trade, but most of these reported a slump in turnover.
The survey revealed that 58% of companies said turnover had slipped below normal levels.
Of those that had not closed sites, 30% said their financial performance was not impacted.
This is from Helen Barnard, acting director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a social justice thinktank, on today’s ONS report about coronavirus deaths and ethnicity.
Today’s figures are a stark reminder that although we are all weathering the same storm, we are not all in the same boat.
People from black and minority ethnic backgrounds are more likely to live in deprived areas, employed in low-paid jobs where they cannot work from home. We know that both these factors increase the risk of catching coronavirus.
Workers from BAME communities are also more likely to live in overcrowded homes, increasing the risk for their families too. We entered the crisis with millions of people locked in poverty, struggling against a rising tide of low pay, insecure jobs and spiralling living costs.
With the Bank of England now forecasting the deepest recession on record, we must ask ourselves what kind of society we want to live in after the virus passes. It doesn’t have to be like this – as a society that prides itself on justice and compassion we can and must do better.
