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1 May 2020updated 06 Oct 2020 9:45am

Lunchtime summary: No longer the “great equaliser“

By Samuel Horti

The notion that Covid-19 is the “great equaliser”, as New York state governor Andrew Cuomo said in March, is now well and truly squashed. 

Several analyses have confirmed that ethnic minority groups are dying in disproportionate numbers compared to white people, but a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, released this morning, is the most comprehensive yet. When age and geography are accounted for, the death rate among black African Britons is 3.7 times the rate of the White British majority. For British Pakistanis, the number is 2.9. In fact, the IFS report shows that every single minority ethnic group bar White Irish has a higher death rate than White British people, when age and geography are stripped out.

Separate figures from the Office for National Statistics published this morning also show that people in the most deprived parts of England are dying from Covid-19 at twice the rate of those in the richest places. 

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