Covid-19 is the great leveller. Or is it? As a friend of mine said recently, "With Covid-19, we're all in the same storm - but not the same boat." Veteran health and gender rights activist, Robin Gorna, continues her reportage from the UK - now with 30,000 reported deaths - and asks why Covid-19 is having such a devastating effect on ethnic minorities, especially those who work in the National Health Service.
The latest UK statistics on Covid-19 show the unrelenting climb in deaths - and with every weekly update we hear a more complex story. We now have over 10% of the global caseload: 29,427 recorded by 5 May (possibly well over 30,000 by the time you read this). Remember, this is mostly hospital deaths - we still don't tell the truth about people dying of Covid-19 in residential and other homes. If we counted them, the death toll would shoot even higher.
A South African friend reassured me, "That's not so bad", until she realised that this is tens of thousands of people dead since the start of the year - not cases detected. We have five to eight times as many deaths as South Africa has confirmed...