Healthcare inequality exposed in Why is Covid Killing People of Colour? on BBC1

Actor David Harewood looks to be in resplendent health, but as a black 55-year-old he’s aghast to discover that he would be three times more likely to die of Covid-19 than a white man of the same age. He sets out to discover why the pandemic has a disproportionate effect on Bame communities. At London’s Northwick Park Hospital, for example, where the sickest patients from Brent (Bame population 65 per cent) were funnelled, Dr Tariq Husain observed: “It wasn’t the white people who were getting Covid.”

One widespread theory is that a deficiency of immunity-boosting vitamin D could be to blame, since it is harder for darker skin to develop enough under dull British skies. The theory offers a ready solution to the problem: supplementation — but it also swerves the issue of racism. Even the professor working on a study cautions that “at best, it’s part of the puzzle”. Another indubitable factor is healthcare inequality, and the programme spells out the implications in detail.

Individual case studies are backed up with plenty of statistics. One obvious explanation is that poverty and deprivation more likely to be experienced by Bame communities, and “deprivation is bad for your health”. Obesity is more prevalent in poor areas (36 per cent as opposed to 21 per cent among the more affluent) and life expectancy is eight years shorter. A person of Bangladeshi origin is 114 per cent more likely than a white person to live in a deprived area. For those of Pakistani heritage, it’s 246 per cent.

People of colour are also much more likely than white counterparts to work in front-line jobs such as transport and the health service. Harewood discovers that 95 per cent of doctors who died of Covid are Bame, even though “doctors aren’t poor”. They are, however, less likely to be listened to when raising issues of inadequate protective equipment and personal safety.

On the patient side, one US study found a widespread belief among healthcare practitioners that “black people can withstand greater pain than white people”, leading to the withholding of pain medication. In the UK, black women are five times more likely to die in pregnancy or during childbirth. One woman was told, as her daughter struggled to give birth in hospital: “Black women’s pelvises are different.”

The most searing element for Harewood, as someone who suffered a psychotic episode when he was younger, involves mental health inequality and harsher treatment for black men with mental illnesses; as he poignantly puts it, “fear of this big black person”. Cutting to the root, he asks whether “racism itself could be making us ill” and learns that the “physiological reaction to cultural oppression” could be adding years to his chronological age. Where’s the vitamin pill for that?

★★★★☆

On BBC1, March 2 at 9pm

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