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’.