Final report on progress to address Covid-19 health inequalities (3 December 2021)

Summary

This report provides an update on cross-government work to address the disparities highlighted by the Public Health England report 'COVID-19: review of disparities in risks and outcomes', published in June 2020. It sets out how the Government's understanding of and response to the pandemic changed over the lifecycle of this work. The report also includes a summary of progress against recommendations from previous reports, lessons learned from this work and an action plan for addressing some of the longer-term issues identified.

Content

The report highlights work done to identify the risk factors affecting ethnic minority groups. It also outlines approaches taken by the Government to try and mitigate these additional risks, including:

• issuing guidance on household transmission, which was particularly important given the higher percentage of people from the Bangladeshi and Pakistani ethnic groups living in multi-generational homes.
• measures to protect taxi drivers, over half of whom are from an ethnic minority background.
• developing a framework to support inclusion of ethnic minority participants in Covid-19 research.
• working with national and local partners to promote vaccine uptake among ethnic minority groups and to tackle misinformation.

The report identifies lessons learned from the pandemic that can be applied to tackling health disparities in wider public health, including:

• ensuring the success of vaccination deployment is carried over to other public health programmes, such as winter flu and Covid-19 booster vaccinations – this includes continuing to use respected local voices to build trust within ethnic minority groups and to help tackle misinformation
• not treating ethnic minorities as a homogenous group – Covid-19 has affected different ethnic groups in different ways throughout the pandemic and a ‘one size fits all’ approach is not an effective way of tackling public health issues.
• avoiding stigmatising ethnic minorities by singling them out for special treatment, which could be taken to imply that they are vulnerable or, in the case of Covid-19, were somehow at fault for the spread of the virus.
• improving the quality of health ethnicity data so that patterns and trends can be spotted quicker in future.