A LEADING Bradford health expert has hit back at rumours in the BAME community that doctors and nurses in Bradford want ethnic minority people to die of coronavirus.

Professor John Wright says the conspiracy theories that hospital staff want Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic patients to die is unfounded.

In his latest blog for the BBC, the epidemiologist and head of the Bradford Institute for Health Research, acknowledges there is concern that members of the BAME community seem more likely to die from Covid-19.

But he says this is likely because members of the South Asian community more frequently live in close proximity to each other and certain health conditions more prevalent in the community are contributory factors in Covid-19 mortality.

He said: "There is a flurry of news stories about black, Asian and minority ethnic communities being at greater risk of dying from Covid-19, and this is a big concern in Bradford, where almost a third of our population is of South Asian heritage.

"I know from my work in epidemics in Africa that where there is fear and panic, and patients become isolated from their families, it doesn't take long for rumours and fake news stories to start circulating.

"In the Covid pandemic, smartphones and social media have connected families who are separated because of the risk of infection - but they've also helped generate a blizzard of dangerous fake news. In Bradford there are online reports that non-white patients admitted to the hospital are being left to die. Anonymous posts are shared thousands of times."

He gives an example of one post, supposedly from a BRI worker, who says that if you have a health condition you shouldn't got to the hospital or "you will not come back alive".

He said: "The effect of this kind of thing is being felt in the hospital, where we have noticed that some patients are scared to be admitted.

A nurse, Sophie Bryant-Miles, told Prof Wright: "I've had patients who want to self-discharge because they think we're trying to kill them. I've had a patient a couple of weeks ago, who wanted to self-discharge because her family was messaging her telling her that if she dies in our care, we won't tell them and we'll just burn her body. These are the things that are being spread around," .

Prof Wright said Sophie complained to Facebook about a group posting pictures of NHS staff - naming them, and accusing them of leaving people to die - but she said often such groups are able to continue operating under a different name.

He said it means people are likely to stay at home and die: "In Bradford we have figures that suggest death rates are going up, outside the hospital."

He added: "Some Asian doctors and nurses at Bradford Royal Infirmary are so worried about fake news scaring away people in their own community who need to be in hospital that they've started a counter-offensive, making short videos of themselves and their patients and posting them online."