Study: minorities should be designated vulnerable to COVID

LONDON (AP) — Researchers writing in a British medical journal are recommending that ethnic minorities should be considered “extremely vulnerable” to COVID-19, a distinction that could give groups hard-hit by the pandemic earlier access to potentially life-saving vaccines.

This suggestion is one of six made by the authors of an analysis published Friday in The BMJ. They say “systemic racism” is the fundamental cause of higher coronavirus mortality among ethnic minority communities.

People from these communities were twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than the U.K.’s white majority population during the first wave of the pandemic, according to researchers from St. George’s, University of London, Harvard University, the University of Manchester and Imperial College London.

“Based on these things, I think it is absolutely clinically, and from a public health point of view, justified to prioritize people to mitigate their risk of mortality from COVID,” Dr. Mohammad Razai, one of the report’s authors, told The Associated Press. “When you place them in the extremely vulnerable category everything else will follow from that … including vaccination.”

People from Black and South Asian backgrounds were more likely than white British people to live in deprived areas. This combined with increased levels of chronic disease and a greater preponderance of people in high-risk jobs who were unable to work from home led to higher rates of infection, hospitalization and admission to intensive care units, the study found.

In addition to including ethnic minority communities in the extremely vulnerable category, the study recommends that authorities work with these groups to develop COVID-19 prevention programs, prepare legally binding plans to decrease occupational exposure, and accelerate prevention...