The Race Equality Foundation is pleased to have helped support a new report published today from National Voices, a coalition of health and social care charities in England, on the unequal impact of the Covid19 pandemic.
Learning the Lessons – The Unequal Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Voices of People and Communities captures the findings from an engagement exercise held earlier this year, by National Voices, about how communities and groups were affected differently by both the Covid19 virus itself, and the measures to control it.
The report paints a grim picture of the ways in which the pandemic response exacerbated existing, deep-rooted inequalities across the UK, and compounded the disadvantages experienced by people from minoritised communities, by disabled people and by people living with long term conditions.
Jabeer Butt, Chief Executive of the Race Equality Foundation, led some of the workshop discussions that contributed to this report, with Abigail Gorman, from SignHealth, Tracey Loftis, from Versus Arthritis, and Dr Jo Brown, from Groundswell.
Alongside contributions from other coalition partners, this report draws on some of the experiences and research the Race Equality Foundation gathered for its Not by choice – the unequal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on disempowered ethnic minority and migrant communities study.
This shed light on the disproportionate impact of the Covid19 pandemic on disempowered ethnic minority and migrant communities. Our report’s findings strongly indicate that evidence-based and responsive policies could have significantly mitigated the disparities in infection rates and mortality among these marginalised populations.
The Race Equality Foundation, hope this work, like others highlighting the inequality experienced by many communities during the pandemic, will be further evidence for the Covid19 Inquiry to look at, and action the recommendations identified.
National Voices have also published two blog posts alongside the report: the first post, examines the findings from this National Voices’ report and considers this alongside the processes taken by the Inquiry; and the second post, offers further detail on the processes of sharing information with the Inquiry, and why this is important for National Voices’ members.
