Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of how patient (a) acquisition and (b) outcome of covid-19 infection within a hospital setting differs by (i) occupation, (ii) clinical setting, (iii) ethnicity and (iv) social deprivation.

Public Health England’s (PHE) rapid review ‘Disparities in the risk and outcomes of COVID-19’ was published on 2 June 2020 and presented findings based on surveillance data available to PHE and through linkage to broader health data sets.

For this review, PHE matched thousands of laboratory records of COVID-19 cases to other health records to draw down accurate data on ethnicity, age, sex, deprivation, and region. They do not take into account the existence of comorbidities, which are strongly associated with the risk of death from COVID-19 and are likely to explain some of the differences.