Today, on the Covid Day of Reflection, London marks five years since the pandemic took tens of thousands of lives. Nobody was unaffected, but Brent was one of the worst-hit boroughs in the capital. A deadly combination of poverty, deprivation, poor housing, racial inequality and low trust in institutions such as the NHS took a terrible toll. At the height of the emergency, excess deaths were three times the national average.
“Covid was such a wake-up call. There's no bigger red line, is there? It's killing you, it's killing your residents, and if there's one thing a council needs to do and health services needs to do is stop people from dying unnecessarily,” John Licorish, Deputy Director of Public Health for Brent tells me. “We saw the impact of 42 people on the same street dying. It was a catalyst.”
