A minority opinion on Covid deaths

When the media have gone large on the conclusions of an overpoweringly tedious report, one of the biggest favours a columnist can do for a readership is to read the source. Friends, you owe me. I will expect flowers and chocolate. For I have located Public Health England’s ‘Beyond the Data: Understanding the impact of Covid-19 on BAME communities’ and ploughed through the whole bloody thing.

This is the report that produced headlines like the Guardian’s ‘Historical racism may be behind England’s higher BAME Covid-19 rate’. Channel 4 News hit the same black-and-brown-patients-are-dying-of-racism note, which conveniently chimes with the current hair-shirtery of Black Lives Matter. A bit too conveniently, I thought, which is why I tortured myself.

You’ll not be surprised that the report is numbingly redundant, with the same paragraphs cut and pasted multiple times throughout the document. You’ll not be surprised that the text is strewn with opaque jargon like ‘culturally competent’. You’ll not be surprised that I was bored witless.

Yet you may be surprised that this earth-shattering revelation of how ‘historical racism’ explains the disparity between white and non-white deaths from coronavirus is not supported by an iota of research. It is scientifically worthless. ‘Beyond the Data’ might better have been titled ‘Without the Data’.

The document that ruined my day comprises two tranches of information. Although PHE did none of its own homework, it did scrounge a fair bit of other people’s, assembling the results of several hospital studies in the UK and US. As the report concedes, the quality of these studies is ‘very low’, their conclusions inconsistent. Yet it’s not our purpose here to challenge the deduction that Covid death rates are higher among non-whites. What matters is why.

Other than collect available statistics, PHE essentially gathered a giant online focus group and invited participants to complain.