People’s Covid Inquiry: How did inequalities and discrimination affect the public during COVID-19?

The sixth session of the People's Covid Inquiry will ask how inequalities and discrimination affected the public during the pandemic. Keep Our NHS Public would like to invite you to take part and register for the session on Zoom.

We all remember the shock we experienced when we saw the faces of healthcare professionals who had died from COVID-19 on the front pages of newspapers last spring. It was undeniable that black and asian people and people from ethnic minorities were overwhelmingly disproportionately affected by the virus.

Inequalities and discrimination

A year on many questions have been asked and we have more information available to us, but very little has been done to address the fact that COVID-19 is still disproportionately affecting people from ethnic minorities in the UK and other high‑income countries, exposing longstanding inequalities for minority and marginalised communities.

And even if you didn't catch COVID-19, the impact of lockdown had hugely varying impacts on different groups. Key workers were forced to go into risky work conditions, while many others lost their jobs as Government economic intervention was announced weeks after it was needed. Parents out at work and in the home also faced unprecedented challenges dealing with conflicting demands, with a financial support package that seemed to have forgotten about them.

This is why the sixth session of the People's Covid Inquiry will ask witnesses including, Mary-Ann Stephenson, Director of the Women's Budget Group, Kamlesh Khunti, Professor of Primary Care Diabetes and Vascular Medicine, University of Leicester and member of Independent SAGE, Dr Latifa Patel, from the British Medical Association and Aliya Yule from Migrants Organise.

In order to answer these questions, we will be asking whether or not there was any consideration of risk for people in our society who faced discrimination and inequality, and whether or not messaging and actions reflected that? We will also try to untangle exactly what the risks were to these groups, and what the repercussions of the actions of the Government over the COVID-19 pandemic were.

Register for the session

You can register for the sixth session on Zoom, and catch up on earlier sessions of the Inquiry on YouTube.

You can also find out more about the People's Covid Inquiry on its website. 

Take part

Let us know about your experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic by filling in our survey, so we can get a broad idea of the impact of Government policy on different groups.