Britain's Ethnic Minorities Are Being Left for Dead
The government could have predicted, and perhaps prevented, many deaths. It did not.
By Sonia Faleiro
Ms. Faleiro is a journalist.
May 22, 2020, 1:00 a.m. ET
LONDON — In early April, Maruthalingam Thiyakumar, a 58-year-old employee of the corner shop in my neighborhood in South London, died from the coronavirus.
While some of my neighbors and I were able to follow Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s injunction to “stay at home” and “save lives,” Mr. Thiyakumar continued to provide toilet paper and tea bags to the anxious customers who crowded the tiny shop where he had worked for 20 years. The government had designated him a “key worker” but failed to give him personal protective equipment. He was exposed to a deadly virus and left to fend for himself.
Mr. Thiyakumar’s fate is tragic — and typical. The pandemic may affect us all, but its effects are not equal. In Britain, which has the highest death toll from the coronavirus after the United States, they are unfolding to reveal a gross inequality. As in America, ethnic minorities — exposed at work and subject to social neglect — are disproportionately falling victim. And the government is doing little to stop it.
The ethnic divides in the data are stark. In England and Wales, according to a recent report, black people are nearly twice as likely to die of the coronavirus as white people, while Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis are also at a significantly higher risk. Thirty-three percent of critically ill coronavirus patients are from ethnic minorities, another study found. Given that ethnic minorities make up only 19.5 percent of the population and are on average younger than white Britons, the figures are damning.
More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/opinion/britain-coronavirus-minorities.html
