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Covid-19: Ethnic data at last but still no gender
20/04/20 .
News
It’s tough to write this story without sounding sarcastic but these are tough time for us all so we’ll try our best.
So there’s a muted cheer for NHS England for finally, better late than never, publishing the daily Covid-19 death data by ethnic group. It’s seriously overdue because, as we and many others have reported, there is evidence that the Coronavirus is hitting people from BAME communities hardest.
Today’s data from NHS England also included the figures broken down by NHS Trust and region and by age. So far so good.
There’s a bit of work involved in producing this daily data. There are nearly 200 NHS Trusts across England, 16 different ethnic groups and six different age groups. A fair bit of categorisation required. But there is still one data breakdown we haven’t got despite repeated requests from the Forum (we first asked a month ago) and that is into male or female. Two categories.
We know they know - how could they not? - because the data appears in the weekly ONS figures that we’ve been reporting.
With evidence that men are perhaps twice as likely to die of Covid-19 as women, it’s hard to justify the continual refusal to publish this information. And it’s hard to continue this story without breaking our promise not to lapse into sarcasm. So, come on NHS England, come on Public Health England, follow the lead of the ONS and the critical care statistics body ICNARC and give us the gender breakdown.
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The Men’s Health Forum need your support It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking. In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to. It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for. We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing. Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.
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