Wednesday 1 July 2020

Sounds a bit racist to me

From Microsoft News:

As Leicester became the first city in the UK to be placed in a local lockdown following a spike of coronavirus cases, there are concerns that other northern areas may follow. Both Bradford and Doncaster are “clearly of concern”, according to a key scientist in the coronavirus response.

Imperial College London's Professor Neil Ferguson, who used to advise the government before resigning for breaching lockdown rules, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "It's inevitable we will (have further local outbreaks), we are relaxing lockdown rules and that means that contacts in the population are going up and that's a very variable process.”

Asked about Bradford and Doncaster, he said: "Those are areas, where not as high as Leicester, but they have some of the highest numbers of cases per 100,000 of the population, which is the relevant measure, so they're clearly of concern.”

His concerns were echoed by epidemiologist John Wright, who told the BBC that areas with similar demographics to Leicester should be on “constant alert” for new outbreaks. He added that areas with large BAME communities and "multi-occupancy, multi-generational living” – including Bradford – were at risk of coronavirus spikes.

18 comments:

Unknown said...

Yeah, but the multi-occupancy, multi-generational living bit will be ignored by many, and it’ll all be cos of racism...

Mark Wadsworth said...

TCO, your comment goes on the same pile as Unknowns. By saying "innit" you are showing that you don't take the topic seriously :-)

Ralph Musgrave said...

My forthcoming and extremely lengthy book is entitled "What you aren't allowed to say because it's racist."

Mark Wadsworth said...

RM, same pile :-)

The Jannie said...

How many more times does that twat Ferguson have to spout total bollox before he's finally asked to leave the studio?

Mark Wadsworth said...

DCB, at last, the non-racist question that everybody is asking!

ontheotherhand said...

I wonder if the statistics have been studied on this. i.e. Given certain elements of the infection rate are random, what is the likelihood that an outlier City with high infection rate emerges for no other reason than chance?

Mark Wadsworth said...

OTOH, in the UK and Sweden it has been noted that people in "BAME communities" are more liable to catch and die of it. They tend to be poorer/less healthy to start with, multi-generational living, don't get any Vitamin D etc. So towns with high BAME population will see higher COVID 19 levels. That's uncontroversial I think.

Andrew Carey said...

There was an anti-poverty campaigner who noted that the 30% most deprived LAs had death rates about twice that of the 10% least deprived. They always seem to choose the bottom 30% versus the richest 10% as that shows the biggest divide in the stats. This campaigner then disclosed that the link between income inequality and early death mortality was well established, and the difference was normally about 2.5 times.
Ah, so Covid-19 kills fewer on low income than you would expect for a disease that takes people before their time. If Covid-19 indeed does that.
Regarding Leicester, Bradford etc, Shelter have done excellent research showing that overcrowded housing ( and not high population density ) is a key determinant of bad outcomes from this chinese RNA.

Mark Wadsworth said...

AC, good stat's re LA, that makes sense.

There must be a big overlap between 'overcrowded housing' and 'multi-generational living' and I assume that it's the 'multi-generational' that swings it. Students, younger people, fruit pickers etc. who share a house; or couples with several kids aren't dropping like flies.

Dinero said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Dinero said...

The Vitamin D is in the Scottish political district notes, that on the internet are called called the Scottish Government. Fourth bullet point down.
https://www.gov.scot/publications/vitamin-d-advice-for-all-age-groups/

Bayard said...

Mark, where you have multi-generational living, you will get much more contact between young people and old people than you would get in the good old traditional British nuclear family. Given it's young people who tend not to display any symptoms and old people who do, then it's not the case that there's less COVID-19 where there's not multi-g living, it's just the oldies are more likely to get it. Ditto Vit D.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B: "where you have multi-generational living, you will get much more contact between young people and old people than you would get in the good old traditional British nuclear family"

Correct. So the youngsters, who aren't too fussed about Covid meet a lot of people, catch it and pass it on to elderly relatives.

A traditional west European pensioner household doesn't come into contact with that many people.

Bayard said...

"A traditional west European pensioner household doesn't come into contact with that many people."

Except Italians and guess what?

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, "except Italians". Yes, but I said "west European" not "south European". Good point nonetheless.

George Carty said...

Isn't the Leicester outbreak down to sweatshop producing fast fashion for Boohoo, and which are almost certainly staffed almost entirely by illegal immigrants living in appalling overcrowded conditions?

Robin Smith said...

Come on everyone. We are all racist. You can't deny that.

The point being there is no one in the world who is not.

Sadly, a deeper investigation into where this leads is forbidden. By the mainstream world view informing all our thought without us realising it