Racial disparity and implicit bias in prescribing practice

UK researchers have brought welcome news as the world's largest randomised controlled clinical trial for a COVID-19 treatment, RECOVERY (Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 therapy), has identified the steroid, dexamethasone, as the first drug to improve survival rates in patients (National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), 2020).

It has also come to light however that COVID-19 occurs at a higher frequency in people of minority ethnic backgrounds (Public Health England, 2020). Despite making up only 14% of the UK population, 35% of coronavirus patients in intensive care were from ethnic minority groups (Siddique and Marsh, 2020) and earlier figures from Office of National Statistics showed that black people are four times more likely to die from the virus than white people (Booth and Barr, 2020). All ethnic minorities appear to be more likely need intensive care than their white counterparts, and newer data suggest that Asians are mostly likely to die from COVID-19 than anyone else, at least in part it seems as a result of their higher rates of diabetes, though the reasons for this association are complex and remain unclear at present (Harrison et al, 2020).