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Black Women On Vulnerability, Invisible Illnesses & Covid-19

Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, the term “vulnerable” found its way into public discourse. But classifying people as “higher risk from coronavirus” doesn’t even begin to capture the challenges the pandemic poses, especially for those whose conditions are invisible. 

Vulnerable is essentially the new BAME for all things Covid. Shortened from ‘clinically moderate to extremely vulnerable’, the catch-all term has lumped 20 million people in England together. With the same brush stroke that paints people as either BAME or white, all nuance is lost. Haphazard use of the term has constructed a binary between vulnerable people and those who believe they are not. But with the unpredictability of Covid, no one really knows how their body will react.

Public Health England reported that death rates were 3.3 times higher in black women than their white counterparts, so what happens when