Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the risk posed by covid-19 to black, Asian, and minority ethnic communities in comparison to the population as whole.

We are very concerned by the apparent disproportionate number of people from minority ethnic backgrounds who have died, both within the National Health Service and overall. We have asked Public Health England (PHE) to complete a rapid review to understand how COVID-19 may be having an impact on different ethnic groups, and other groups of concern. PHE has begun linking thousands of existing health records for people who have had COVID-19 in order to gather more robust data.

To complement this rapid review by PHE, the National Institute for Health Research and UK Research and Innovation issued a joint call on 22 April for research proposals to investigate emerging evidence of an association between ethnicity and COVID-19 incidence and adverse health outcomes.