I am aware of the massive dominance of age risk, our UK medics volunteered to help with our crisis sadly losing their lives in doing so. Probably the BAME risk in mid March wasn’t highlighted/known as age most definitely was. Hero’s all of them IMO
Erm, the point I've been making and that @BigChocFrenzy has mentioned as well is that in any model the risk of death doubles every 6 year or so. So a retired doctor in his 70s may have hundreds of the times the risk of death of a junior doctor of 25.
The BAME point has been shouted from the rafters, but that's really about structural inequalities rather than any inherent fragility of brown/black people once infected.
The specific structural inequalities are:
- poor people in general have worse diet, worse education, lower income, work in jobs that were not furloughable
ethnic minorities are massively* concentrated in the areas which experienced the full force of covid-19 (particularly London).
certain ethnic minorities are much* more likely to work in jobs that are specifically at risk, over and above jobs generally. For example, a very high % of taxi drivers are Bangladeshi and Pakistani men.
- certain ethnic minorities are likely to have been born outside the UK and will have a different (and absent) medical history, exposure to certain infectious diseases, early diet malnutrition, etc.
The structural inequalities whereby black men, for example, are less likely than white men, to be working in office jobs meant that black men were more likely to catch covid at work.
That doesn't mean that bin men in London who are black are more at risk than bin men in London who are white, for example.
Also we don't really know the extent to which culture, education, religion, makes certain populations more likely to spread covid, for example due to extended families, prevalance of attending regular worship, amount of socialization, etc.
So it is almost certain that being male as opposed to female makes you more likely to die following infection by a factor of around 2x.
It is also certain that being 70 as opposed to 17 means you are hundreds of times more likely to die following infection.
For two people of comparable health, living conditions, job, one of whom is black and one of whom is white, the risk is likely to be identical or all but.
It might be that the black worker is more likely on average to live with an elderly relative, for example, but this would not be something we should evaluate on a population level by sending non-white people home from work.
Rather we would look at people's home conditions, health (including morbid obesity) age, and sex, and then try to work out a sort of priority list.
For example, a couple in their 30s in normal health would not be furloughed, while a single woman of 45 who was morbidly obese might be. And a person of 25 who lived with an 80 year old grandparent might be.
The extent to which ethnicity becomes important is if for example we can find structural racism, for example, clearly the bins need to be emptied, but for example jobs which are disproportionately done by ethnic minorities that are not given the same of protection as jobs where ethnic minorities are less prevalent.
The problem is this is quite hard, in that care workers on NMW are clearly lower paid, less educated, often ESL speakers, and inherently less likely to complain than, say, senior consultants.