COVID-19. People that Boris Johnson still doesn’t know exist
Update 20th September
Hesketh Benoit, basketball coach for the North London Borough of Haringey has written in the Huffington Post about 37 people he knew in the Tottenham area who died of COVID-19 during April and May 2020. Not just a statistic but real people he and others in the community knew well.
We cannot allow this to happen again, even if Johnson still doesnt know such people exist.
On 24th July the ONS published updated statistics for COVID-19 deaths to the end of June 2020.
A main point is:
Of the 10 local authorities with the highest age-standardised mortality rates for deaths involving COVID-19 over this period, nine were London Boroughs; Brent had the highest overall age-standardised rate with 216.6 deaths per 100,000 people, followed by Newham (201.6 deaths per 100,000 people) and Haringey (185.1 deaths per 100,000 people).
Local Authorities in these areas (and elsewhere) have worked very hard to address this situation. Their reward is to be starved of necessary funds.
While fortunately the above is a three month average and figures are very significantly down for June it still looks like there are people Johnson doesn’t know exist here.
When Henry Mayhew started the series of social investigations into the London working-class in 1849 that was to become London Labour and the London Poor he laid out a prospectus in the Morning Chronicle. He wrote of investigating the ‘large and comparatively unknown body of people’ who comprised the labouring poor who lived in slum housing often in insanitary conditions with at best uncertain employment.
He set a pattern that has emerged at times of crisis since.
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005 revealing a Government and President in George W Bush that was not only unprepared to deal with it but had reduced funding previously for measures that might have helped, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Michael Brown said, “We’re seeing people that we didn’t know exist’.
The former Guardian journalist Gary Younge who reported from New Orleans at the time recently made the link to the situation now.
The pattern of Katrina has indeed been echoed in the Government’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis.
Only after sustained pressure by a few media critics did the Government agree to publish the daily totals of deaths in Care homes. These were and remain sadly substantial. Some have argued that the residents of homes were not hospitalised when seriously ill but left to die where they were to avoid the NHS being overwhelmed. An independent inquiry will need to examine that as well as the failure to provide adequate PPE for workers in the homes.
Yet picking up on Younge’s point another perspective might be that the Government didn’t really know what the scale of the problem in Care homes was and, based on its earlier herd immunity strategy- now changed-believed that numbers of the elderly and vulnerable would die anyway.
Reality has a way of intruding into right-wing ideological fantasy strategies as George W Bush found out in 2005.
This came recently with the publication of details, broken down to local authority areas, by the Office of National Statistics of all COVID-19 deaths from March 1st to April 17th. This wasn’t some exercise in constructing a league table of deaths-important though it is to record every death and value every life.
Rather it focused attention on where COVID-19 deaths had been particularly high and implicitly invited discussion of why this might be.
Of the 11 areas with the highest death rate everyone was in London
The pattern of poverty, housing & health identified 171 years ago by Henry Mayhew in London’s poorest districts continues.
The highest UK COVID-19 mortality rates per 100,000 population in the UK are in the London Boroughs of Newham 144.3, Brent 141.5, Hackney 127.4, Tower Hamlets 122.9 and Haringey 119.3.
Philip Glanville, the Mayor of Hackney, quoted in the Financial Times on the 2nd May argued that “the links between inequality, poverty, ethnicity and health” were the key to his borough’s death rate of 127 per 100,000.
Indeed these are people, overwhelmingly poor, working-class, many from ethnic minorities, who have suffered years of Tory austerity, of public services and the NHS cut and cut again and housing conditions which are far from ideal as the cost of homes in London has soared and Tory policies meaning little Council housing has been built.
Yet these same people are those who keep the NHS going, who drive buses and tubes, who clean streets and work in supermarkets. They are low paid but as the last two months have underlined absolutely essential.
The Tories may not have known such people existed, but they do now, and political change is on the agenda.
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