All the doctors dying are Asian - what’s going on?

[MMXVi]

And why is nobody asking questions about this?

I’m over-invested in the answer because my sister is a doctor very much on the frontline, and we’re of Indian ethnicity. I want her to be protected and if she’s facing some sort of additional genetic, behavioural or dietary risk I want that flagged up to her and other doctors PDQ, not to mention their patients of the same ethnicity.

If I see another glib and possibly slightly racist response about BAME people being poorer and therefore more prone to underlying conditions I’ll flip my lid totally by the way. There’s a world of difference between an Asian hospital consultant on £150k in stockbrokerville and someone Asian on the breadline in an overcrowded council flat, and it isn’t helpful to lump them together in this instance.

So far, I’ve seen a thread about Vitamin D3 deficiency making darker-skinned people more susceptible to respiratory illness. That makes sense to me, and I’ve already ordered some from Amazon for my sister as well as the rest of our family.

My mother (not medically qualified) has a touching belief in the anti-inflammatory and anti-carcinogenic powers of turmeric so I’m making daal as we speak.

My dad (retired very senior doctor and the veteran of more than one pandemic) says probably multi-factorial, but as he’s currently recovering from cancer and therefore very high risk, I’m not going to make him elaborate.

Any other ideas and theories?

Anyone else concerned about why the press have neglected to mention this glaringly obvious information?

I had a difficult and anxious weekend and I’m finding it quite hard to regulate my anger about this today.

If all those dead doctors were white, Matt Hancock would be getting annihilated.

This is just racism in another form. The immigrants and their kids are expendable.

I'm so sorry. Know that most of us absolutely do not think that. I'm in a vulnerable group so I can understand the fear to an extent. It does seem like elderly, disabled, and now BAME communities have been viewed as expendable. I hope instead it's incompetence because that's easier to accept. I hope more questions are raised by the media about the impact on the BAME community, that's there's more research on it, that something can be done to help, and that going forwards the government takes this impact into account when deciding on next course of action.

MMX, I thought we had worked out it was not to do with colour (although it may be to do with Vit D) www.dropbox.com/s/ka7h4fbi7xdz9s9/Covid-19%20and%20Vitamin%20D%20Information.pdf

Lots of people are cross at the moment about a lot of unfairnesses. The whole thing is awful particularly for those who are dying and secondly those with no job and a life's work destroyed and no pay coming in.

We have destroyed the lives of most of the 60m of the UK in order to preserve the life of a relatively fee elderly and obese and ill - so actually it is totally the other way round - we are suffering massive pain to save the lives of a very very few.

We are also all suffering in a way we were never prepared to do for those with HIV during the AIDS days presumably because we value those who are old and ill in the UK more than those who are gay.

Half a million is the very very few?

I am aghast that HCP don’t have a full medical including vaccine records before they’re allowed to work.

Not had any sort of medical for work in the NHS since pre 2010 (cutbacks I presume). I think I’ve had to fill in forms about vaccinations but wouldn’t swear to it.

Many doctors are Asian though! Asian people have an underlying susceptibility to renal disease and diabetes which may not help them faced with COVID-19.

BAME account for 13% of the UK population about about 33% of those who end up in ICU with Coronavirus.

Xenia "The ill" meaning people with underlying conditions is actually a very large group. Add in "the elderly" (WHO figures show the risks increase from middle-age (40-50), people with smoking history, and the very many overweight people in the UK. That's millions.

Hopefully we've learnt lessons from the poor handling of the HIV crisis (which isn't only a "gay disease").

I don't think our social distancing is aiming to save 500,000 lives though is it - we are just trying to spread deaths out over time so we have enough ICU beds for people. I don't think we expect 500,000 deaths but every year we had 600,000 normal deaths in the UK and lock down leads to more of those for a start. We might have an extra 50,000 deaths in the UK in 2020 perhaps from covid 19? I am just guessing and 60m people have masses of financial ruin, depression, civil liberties destroyed and 1m on universal credit.

Xenia, HIV is transmitted mainly sexually; it's not comparable to Covid. There were a lot of public health campaigns aimed at promoting safer sex.

OP; there IS uproar that Matt Hancock and the Government have fucked up with PPE and put NHS workers at risk. Would there be EVEN MORE uproar if the doctors who have died were white? I don't know.

@Xenia We have destroyed the lives of most of the 60m of the UK in order to preserve the life of a relatively fee elderly and obese and ill - so actually it is totally the other way round - we are suffering massive pain to save the lives of a very very few.

Is this how your brain processes this situation? Are you that stupid to not grasp that the measures being taken are to stop the country being destroyed far more so than you feel it already has? What do think would happen if the UK had done nothing? Who would be left in the NHS to look after you? Have you still not grasped the concept of exponential growth and how fast the spread would incapacitate all infrastructure.

If you’re a member of the BAME population though @Xenia, and at enhanced risk of covid-19 morbidity for whatever reason you can socially isolate to stay safe.

HCP don’t have that choice. They still need to be at their work which, as we discussed up thread, for many BAME medics has a religious and not just vocational importance.

But if they’re at enhanced risk for whatever reason they should not be frontline staff dealing with the most ill patients, surely?

Xenia seems to have missed the point - we’re not doing lockdown merely to save the elderly and infirm, we’re doing it to save the NHS, so that it’s in good enough shape afterwards to save the young and economically productive.

People saying racism in the NHS is not a thing..it is a thing, as in many other organisations. If you Google Unison NHS racism, you will find some info from when the union did a survey of NHS BAME members.

The only way we can stamp out racism is to acknowledge it still exists and have an open and honest dialogue about the impact on BAME staff and patients.

There is also a high proportion of BAME working in transport, i.e. London Bus drivers.

The Vit D theory is interesting. I would think that women are more likely to take a daily multivitamin than men so would be more likely to have higher levels.

Of course, @ilove, and I did apologise up thread for concentrating the thread on doctors, which is very self-interested. Reason being it was started after my worries for my sister, who is a frontline hospital doctor. I don’t want to dismiss other professions at all - everyone at disproportionate risk is important, including the ill and the old!

On an anecdotal level, last time I was in my local hospital I was in a lift with a group of healthcare assistants when they started an islamophobic discussion. I didn't say anything as my baby was with me but thought that I would not want to be a Muslim patient under their care.

We are doing also for every other person in need of the NHS for whatever reason.

If the NHS became overwhelmed due to COVID there would be no capacity for A&E or other acute or chronic conditions.

Can you imagine turning away ambulances with the injured from a RTA? A child who had an accident in the home or a child with chronic or life limiting condition being refused care or a bed because the hospital was full or infected.

Our NHS staff will have a massive catchup job once we breach the peak/plateau for COVID as the backlog of other medical issues and postponed surgery has to be undertaken. These conditions will have likely deteriorated whilst waiting. Then there will be the additional new health issues caused by lockdown - MH, cardiovascular, obesity, alcoholism etc to add to their burden.

And this will have to be undertaken by mentally and physically exhausted, traumatised, grieving NHS staff who will have family that will have also suffered job loss, illness etc.

It’s a v long and v painful road ahead.

And the very least we can do is stay home not just to save any old life - but out NHS and frontline workers lives.

Just clarifying, it is not currently legal to enforce vaccinations or blood tests of any kind unless a person has impaired capacity. I worked in infectious diseases for 15 years. No one checked if I had a BCG and we usually had at least one TB patient on the ward. Every year occupational health would wheel their flu vaccine trolley around and at least 50% of staff would refuse to be vaccinated. Likewise there were patients with open, drug resistant TB going out nightclubbing and in normal circumstances there is no law to stop that (a Coronavirus act has now come in allowing enforcement powers).

@whataboutbob I thought you could apply to detain people with TB? Trying to find a reference buy my knowledge is 20 years out of date and it's probably all changed!!

There actually isn’t a law. In the States you can and no doubt in other countries too.

Xenia - I'm so dismayed that people are still saying this stuff. Imagine what the country would be like if 200,000 people became seriously ill with an inability to breathe at roughly the same time? Over the course of 4 weeks say, people outide spreading it everywhere. Ambulances overwhelmed, people dying in doorways, in their homes uncared for, bodies found weeks later, families fighting to get their loved ones into A&E, the army stopping them getting near hospitals. Once the 200,000 spread it and many die, imagine another wave of 200,000 seriously ill the next month. Morgues overwhelmed, mass burials and a breakdown of society.
What would that do to the economy and jobs? People afraid to go to work and getting sacked. HCPs afraid to go to work and staying home because the frontline is too much.

The BCG doesn’t really work as a new vaccination in an adult, I have no medical knowledge as to why but I have never had one but all of my children had one as babies because their father is from a high risk family, I was told that there is no point having one at my age.

Until a few years ago people had the BCG test to see if they were immune to TB I though it was and then if needed the vaccine at about 13 or 14 at that age only although my son born in Brent had it aged 1 because of a lot of TB in the area due to lots of people form TB areas where we lived in those days in London. www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/bcg-tuberculosis-tb-vaccine/