Tue 28 April 2020:
The holy month of Ramadan is underway, and the Central Jamia Mosque Ghamkol Sharif in Birmingham should be full of worshippers. But this year, the main arrivals are the dead.
While the mosque in the central English city has been closed in response to the coronavirus pandemic, its parking lot has been transformed into a temporary morgue with room for 150 bodies.
The volunteer-run mortuary, with its white tents, industrial refrigerators and neat stacks of coffins, is evidence of the toll the virus is taking on Britain’s Muslim and ethnic-minority communities. The two most diverse regions of the U.K. — London and the Midlands area centred around Birmingham — have seen the largest number of deaths in the outbreak.
It’s a similar story at the nearby Green Lane Mosque, where coffins lie stacked up inside the prayer hall. Usually the mosque holds about 25 funerals a year. For the past three weeks it has seen five a day.
Britain has recorded more than 20,700 hospital deaths of people with coronavirus. Thousands more are likely to have died in nursing homes.
Statistics show that 16% of those who died in Britain with the coronavirus up to April 17 were from black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds. About 13% of the U.K. population comes from those backgrounds.
Even more starkly, data from Intensive Care National Audit and Research shows that a third of people in intensive care with COVID-19 in the U.K. are non-white. And many of the over 100 health care workers who have died in the outbreak were from BAME backgrounds.
A similar trend has been seen in countries including the United States, where an Associated Press analysis found that about 42% of Americans who have died from COVID-19 were black, while African Americans account for roughly 21% of the population in the areas analyzed.
The government has asked public health officials to investigate the virus’ heavy impact on minorities.
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