Let me quote, very carefully, a report made by the UK Office of National Statistics, which is the most reliable source in the UK, not biased as politicians in charge may be.
It looks at the virus impact in the different ethnic groups of the UK.
I still have my doubts on the validity to interpret things within an ethnic group, whereas my preference would have been to look at household income as a main criterion.
It can be expected that the household income, and the level of education helps people reduce the risks (larger houses and apartments, with several bathrooms, and fewer people per square meter help isolate inside a household when needed, e.g.).
Now the UK has this tradition inherited from colonial times that they look at ethnicity first and income second if they ever do.
This is dangerous because it may create the wrong impression that there are differentiated genetic response factors, whereas there may just be a question of poverty/wealth.
Here is the quote taken from today's "The Guardian":
QUOTE START "
Nick Stripe, head of health analysis at the Office for National Statistics, explaining to the BBC what its report on coronavirus deaths and ethnicity (see 9.41am and 10.33am) shows.
Your probability of dying with Covid is made up of two things, firstly your probability of actually being infected in the first place and then secondly, your probability of dying once you have been infected. Now those two things are influenced by your personal circumstances to a large degree, so the first thing we did is, we looked at adjusting for age, what the difference was of dying to these ethnic groups and that brought out some quite stark differences. So just adjusting for age, we saw that the black ethnic grouping was just over 4 times more likely to die of Covid-related issues than the white group, the Bangladeshi and Pakistani grouping was about 3.5 times more likely and the Indian grouping about 2.5 times more likely. Those figures are just when we adjust for age, but we know other circumstances matter, so we want to try and introduce those other circumstances, which we can do, because we have geographical location from the death certificate and the death registration. So we know for example, big cities like London, Birmingham and Manchester have been more affected, we know from figures that we released last Friday that whether you’re in an urban or rural area matters, your area’s relative level of deprivation matters, so there’s really a strong social gradient to mortality rates generally, and even more for Covid. So we needed to adjust for those other factors as well, so geography is a key one and then other socio-economic factors, we could get data from the census records that we’ve linked the deaths to, so things like people’s qualifications, people’s housing circumstances, what type of jobs or occupations they had and their self-reported health. When we adjust for all those other things, then actually those rates come down significantly, a lot of the difference can be explained by these geographical and socio-economic factors. Once we’ve adjusted for that, the black ethnic group is now about 90% or 1.9 times more likely to die from Covid-related issues, Bangladeshi and Pakistani males are about 80% more likely, females about 60% more likely and Indian females are about 40% more likely and males about 30% more likely.
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3) Mahesh Jayaweera at al. (2020). "Transmission of COVID-19 virus by droplets and aerosols: A critical review on the unresolved dichotomy" Environmental Research volume 188 (2020), Open Access Elsevier Public Health Emergency Collection, Available at:
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It seems evident that transmission related time is country- and context - related problem to resolve and a possible forthcoming mutation of the virus might lead to new case-study parameters and a need for further studies. Yours sincerely, Bulcsu Szekely