Mohammad Rakib's aunt Nazma Abidin recently died from COVID-19. “My aunt's immediate family, her children, and grandchildren were not permitted to see her and she died, alone in a hospital bed, just four days after testing positive,” he told BuzzFeed News.



Rakib, who is of Bangladeshi heritage, lives in Tower Hamlets, in east London, where he has seen firsthand the devastating impact of the coronavirus on his community. As well as the death of his aunt, he has witnessed friends, relatives and neighbours suffer losses as hundreds of people per day continue to die from the virus.

“My best friend lost her uncle and grandmother just 24 hours apart,” he said. “A neighbour shared a message asking for prayers for his friend who lost his mother and older sister in the space of a week. I now have another aunt in hospital and she too has tested positive for COVID-19.”

In minority communities such as Rakib’s across the UK, the impact of coronavirus is being felt disproportionately. While everyone in the country is dealing with the fear over the pandemic’s spread, in these communities the toll is even higher.

A report out last week from the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC) suggested that ethnic minority groups are already being impacted more by the virus. It found that 35% of intensive care patients were from minority ethnic backgrounds — despite the fact that they make up just 14% of the general population.

The research, taking data from around 2,000 seriously ill patients, found that 14% were Asian and the same proportion were black. The research provides the first real quantitative data on the impact the virus is having on minority populations in the UK.

The government has now launched a formal review into why people from BAME backgrounds are being disproportionately affected.

“That’s something that we’re looking at very carefully to try to understand,” the government’s chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance told ITV News on Monday, adding that the impact was “particularly noticeable among some of the healthcare practitioners that we’ve seen who have unfortunately succumbed as a result of this”.