Review calls for more research on COVID-19 BAME risk

A new review focussing on COVID-19 has found a markedly higher risk of death and vulnerability among Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) groups.

Partners representing Lancashire Resilience Forum  – including Blackburn with Darwen’s Director of Public Health, Dominic Harrison – carried out the rapid review of national data and evidence in conjunction with academic partners and the University of Oxford.

The findings have been published on the University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine COVID-19 evidence portal.

A preliminary Lancashire analysis of BAME hospitalisations and deaths for one hospital in East Lancashire is to be published later this week that may lead to further advice for BAME communities such as ensuring supplementation of Vitamin D for a healthy respiratory and immune system.

Dominic Harrison, also Chair of the Lancashire Resilience Forum’s BAME COVID-19 health inequalities group, said:

These issues are of critical importance and urgently need to be addressed but they are complex. There may be multiple factors driving this association, such as genetic, socioeconomic, behavioural, environmental and cultural.  There are also many potential factors including long-term health conditions within our diverse BAME populations.

We will need further research to improve our understanding of potential differences in risks for ethnic groups.  This means understanding which groups are at greatest risk of a range of adverse outcomes and, based on that understanding, what can be done about this to reduce health inequalities.

Lancashire LRF is actively involved with academic groups in the North West in the National Institute for Health Research and Innovation (UKRI) call for research proposals to investigate emerging evidence of an association between ethnicity and COVID-19 incidence and adverse health outcomes with a deadline of 11^th May 2020.