Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government when they started to (1) collect, and (2) publish data relating to the ethnicity of those infected with COVID-19; and for what reasons this did not start at the beginning of the pandemic in the UK.

Data on those infected with COVID-19 are collected by Public Health England (PHE) for new diagnoses and hospitalised patients. Standard recording practice across laboratory systems requires recording of only minimal data (such as date of birth and name) as these records are not intended for disease surveillance purposes.

PHE has begun a rapid review to better understand how COVID-19 may be having an impact on different ethnic groups. As part of this review, PHE is matching thousands of laboratory records of COVID-19 cases to other health records to draw down accurate data on ethnicity, age, sex and geographical region. The first results will be published by the end of May.