Mosque makeshift morgue highlights coronavirus toll
‘Virus hits people of all ages’
BIRMINGHAM, England, April 28, (AP): 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 England 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 centered in Birmingham – have seen the largest number of deaths in the outbreak.
Mohammed Zahid, a mosque trustee who helped set up the mortuary with a firm of Muslim funeral directors, said the mosque in Birmingham’s predominantly South Asian Small Heath district normally holds one or two funerals a week.
In the last few weeks, “we were doing five to six a day,”
Johnson
he said.
“You can see how the families were grieving,” said 44-year-old Zahid, who wears a mask, coveralls and gloves as he moves among the coffins.
Local government social-distancing rules allow only six people to attend each burial.
“Especially when they can’t get their own cousins and brothers and sisters around them - it’s made it really hard for the people who’ve lost their loved ones,” said Zahid, who has lost two aunts to COVID-19. “What do you say to a family who’s got five sons or daughters, and some of them have to stay home?”
Prayer
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.
“Everybody’s worrying about whether it will be their family members next, their loved ones,” said Saleem Ahmed, the mosque’s head of welfare and services.
Britain has recorded more than 20,700 hospital deaths of people with coronavirus. Thousands more are likely to have died in nursing homes.
The virus has hit people of all ages and backgrounds, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who spent three nights in intensive care. But evidence suggests that ethnic-minority Britons are feeling a disproportionate impact.
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 14% 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 nonwhite. And many of the over 100 health care workers who have died in the outbreak were from BAME backgrounds.
The government has asked public health officials to investigate the virus’ heavy impact on minorities.
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.
In France, the poor and largely immigrant neighborhoods on the fringes of Paris have seen some of the highest increases in mortality since the outbreak began.
Kamlesh Khunti, a professor of primary care, diabetes and vascular medicine at the University of Leicester, said complex factors may be involved. While black Americans often have worse access to medical care than white Americans, “in the U.K. we have a free health care service, so we can’t put it down to just inequalities in care,” he said.