You were right in the first instance. BAME is something worthy of significant consideration and study with regards the virus.
"The Office for National Statistics analysis shows the inequality in death rates between black and white people persists after taking into account age, where people live, and some measures of deprivation and prior health."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/health-52602467
You can't dismiss the stat discrepancy so casually. It should alarm us, and have us want to understand the reasons behind it, with supporting research. We should be open to the possibility that something to do with ethnicity at a gene inheritance level could be a cause of susceptibility and we should be open to offering greater support to those who are more likely to suffer the virus.
It is doubly important to raise this issue now, in a period of prolonged racist Tory ideology.
Im not dismissing the discrepancy, There’s a discrepancy because of the reasons I mentioned and I’ll mention them again. Black and Asians dying at a higher rate due to the coronavirus isn’t really down to a ‘black gene’ or an ‘Asian gene’.
Social, economic, cultural and dietary reasons are what makes blacks and Asians more prone to diabetes, obesity and being exposed to the coronavirus, not a ‘gene’. These problems were there before the corona and there’ll be here when it’s gone.
Type 2 diabetes is three to five times higher in black and Asians than whites in the UK. It was the same before corona.
Black and Asians have a higher rate of obesity (in particular childhood obesity) than whites. It was the same before corona.
Black and Asians are dominating our hospitals. They’re the security guards, the bus drivers, the taxi drivers, the carers, you know the jobs people don’t want to do, meaning they’re being exposed to infection more. A large amount have also come to work from abroad where they won’t have had a lifetime of sufficient medical care.
That is why the ratio of death is higher amongst them.
Black and asian people have been disproportionately dying from these diseases for years, years before the coronavirus. Black and Asian people have been doing these undesirable job roles for years.
The stats tell you the coronavirus by itself is not actually that deadly. But when it’s mixed in with diabetes and obesity then you have a problem. The idea that we need to be studying into ‘genes’, “and have us want to understand the reasons behind it, with supporting research” is all just lip service, pr bullshit and actually kind of insulting.
The reasons have been staring us in the face for years. The coronavirus has highlighted the issue but for all the wrong reasons.
If the powers that be actually want to help and are actually concerned about the black and asian community, then they should actually do something about it, do something about inequality, do something about institutional racism, get in these communities and give them medical advice, highlight the need for a well balanced diet. But that’s not what we’re getting, what we’re getting is pussy footing around, blabbering on about “genetic studies”, as if that’s going to solve or assist with anything.
There are plenty of healthy black and asian people out there completely unaffected by the coronavirus but yeah ‘genes’ or something.