COVID death rates are twice as high in the UK’s most deprived communities, alarming new research has found.
A report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies lays bare the extent to which Covid is exacerbating inequality across the country, with the best paid and most highly educated much better able to ride out the crisis.
Poorer and ethnic minority workers are much more likely to catch and die from Covid because they are more likely to work in frontline occupations or jobs that can’t be done at home.
And while the impact on health and mortality has been far greater among the older generation, it is the younger generation which has felt the economic consequences of the pandemic.
More pensioners report an improvement in their financial situation than the reverse over this year.
Meanwhile, people under 25 were more than twice as likely as older workers to have lost their job by this autumn.
Author Sir Angus Deaton said: “The vaccines should, at some point this year, take us into a world largely free of the pandemic.
“It is imperative to think about policies that will be needed to repair the damage and that focus on those who have suffered the most.
“We need to build a country in which everyone feels that they belong.”
