A whistle-blower nurse at the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) claims that nurses and healthcare assistance from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds are being pressured to work in coronavirus wards more than their white colleagues. In an interview with Nursing Times magazine, Carol Cooper, head of equality, diversity and human rights at Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Trust, said “BME staff feel that they are being put on COVID wards and exposed to patients with COVID over and above their colleagues,” said Cooper, who won Diversity and Inclusion Champion of the Year at the Nursing Times Workforce Summit and Awards 2019. “Some are saying they are being taken from the wards that they usually work on and put on the COVID wards and they feel that there is a bias the same bias that existed before they are feeling is now influencing their being appointed and they are terrified, everybody is terrified. Cooper asserted. Senior nurse Cooper said she had struggled to pin down official data, informal information on deaths suggested BME people were overrepresented, noting that the first 10 doctors to have died after testing positive were from BME. The UK government last week announced that it will be launching a formal review into the impact of coronavirus on people from BME backgrounds, including staff, although the timescale of the inquiry is not clear. She explained that people from BME backgrounds were at a “greater risk” from coronavirus because these communities were more likely to have “a number of comorbidities” such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, sickle cell, thalassemia and lupus. The pandemic is “shining a light on the inequities which are part of the system in which we exist”, warned Cooper. “Many of us knew that BME people would be overrepresented, given their proportion of the population in the mortality and morbidity figures because of the comorbidities that exist in our communities, because of the location of our communities in terms of the workforce being on the frontline because of the amount of people that are caught in the poverty trap and live in households that have higher occupancy,” she added. The Nursing Times said that intervention from Carol comes after they reported on concerns that BME healthcare staff were being “whitewashed” out of media coverage of the coronavirus crisis with claims that the focus has been mainly on white colleagues. Carol Cooper is now calling for a “centre for ethnic health” to research into the “disparities and variations” in BME communities. “I am calling for a centre for ethnic health which makes sure that we look at the health of some of the most disenfranchised populations in the UK and take action to prevent and promote their health,” she said and added this moment in time cannot be passed without something happening because people are dying.