Hancock ignored Khan’s warning about impact of Covid on minority groups

It was obvious that Covid was disproportionately affecting people from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds “at an early stage” of the pandemic, mayor of London Sadiq Khan has said.

Giving evidence at the UK Covid inquiry, Khan said the disparity was “clear from a number of metrics”.

“If you see the photographs of the first ten doctors who lost their lives,” he said, “the thing that strikes you is they’re all people of colour.

“In relation to transport workers, I’m afraid in London we lost 105 transport workers… I would write to every transport worker whose details we had, their bereaved families, and I noticed the names I was writing were all ethnic minority names.”

He added: “I heard stories about Londoners who were Filipinos who thought they had to work in the wards without PPE because their visa could be taken away if they didn’t do so.”

Doctors have said an early lack of understanding about Covid’s impact on minority groups was likely deadly because it meant that public health messaging, for instance, was not adequately tailored.

In early May 2020 Khan said he wrote to then health secretary Matt Hancock about the need for “urgent action to introduce routine ethnic data collection within death registrations in England”.

At the time, the ethnicity of those who died did not appear on their death certificate. Khan had been attempting to understand how different communities were being impacted but “couldn’t be told” because ethnicity data on those who had died was not being collected, he said under questioning.

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In the letter, shown to the inquiry, Khan wrote: “Evidence has been emerging of how Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities may be disproportionately affected by Covid-19 including, sadly, deaths from or complicated by this deadly virus… I am concerned, however, that the lack of ethnic data recording in death registrations is holding us back from getting a full picture of the differential impacts Covid-19 is having on Londoners.”

Khan said he received no response to this letter, and so contacted then home secretary Priti Patel at the end of May to raise his concerns. He said he was given “short shrift” in a response by a junior minister.

Giving evidence today, he said that around the cabinet table “there was no understanding of why it’s important, and no action”. He added that “very few cabinet members around there probably represent a diverse community” and that there was “evidence of structural racism” in how the government responded to the pandemic.

It was not until October, five months after Khan’s first letter, that ethnicity began to be recorded on death certificates.

The mayor of London also criticised the government for failing to involve him and the other ‘metro mayors’ in COBRA meetings that took place in February and early March 2020.

“I genuinely think fewer lives would have been lost had there been a more collegiate response from the government,” he said.

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