Overseas-born migrants three times higher chance to die

There have been almost three times as many COVID-19 deaths in Australia among people born overseas compared to those who were born here.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has examined the nation’s COVID-19 death statistics and found those who were born in North Africa and the Middle East were about 10 times more likely to die from the virus than those born in Australia — after age was accounted for — while people who came from South-East Asia and Southern and Central Asia recorded twice as many COVID-19 deaths.

That is compared to people born in countries such as the United Kingdom and Ireland, who had similar death rates to those born in Australia.

Out-dated and slow health messages has been an issue

Labor has used the data to accuse the Coalition of once again neglecting multicultural communities during the pandemic, after translation errors and out-of-date vaccine advice were uncovered in its health messaging distributed in languages other than English.

Shadow Multicultural Affairs Minister Andrew Giles said the figures were “unacceptable” in a multicultural country. “The Morrison-Joyce government has shown it is incapable of learning from the pandemic or [of] listening to community voices, with tragic consequences,” he said.

At the start of the pandemic, the ABC revealed concerns about the federal government’s handling of high-risk groups such as migrants, with community representatives telling an expert panel of doctors and politicians that they were involved in Australia’s COVID-19 response “on an ad-hoc basis or not at all”.

The panel identified migrants and refugees as among those at a higher risk of contracting the virus and passing it on without realising because they were more likely to have an underlying chronic illness and miss out on important health information not in their language.

Since then, nonsensical language translations of COVID-19 public health messages have also been distributed to multicultural communities, while critical public health information targeting diverse communities was left weeks out of date.

‘We should have worked this out’

Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia chair Mary Patetsos said culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) Australians were also more vulnerable to COVID-19 because they were highly represented in some of the workplaces that recorded high cases.

“They’ve been the drivers of the trucks, they’ve been the workers in aged care, the care workers, the workers in hospitals who have been, you know, at the frontline,” she said.

Ms Patetsos also said much more should have been done to prevent a disproportionate mortality rate, arguing the government did not properly engage with diverse communities in its public health messaging.

“[They] should have anticipated better and responded to the risks so that we didn’t get this anomaly in terms of mortality and prevalence amongst those community groups,” she said.

“The communication campaign should have targeted those communities and should have alleviated any fears earlier so that we had high vaccination rates quickly, because of those other factors that would have made [migrants] more vulnerable.”

Community leaders take important part

On Wednesday, Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly conceded during Senate estimates there had been “particular issues in culturally and linguistically diverse communities”.

He said outbreak epicentres across various waves of the virus, such as Melbourne’s north and west in 2020 and south-western Sydney in 2021, had been in areas with high overseas-born populations, including sizeable Middle Eastern diasporas.

Senators also heard the government and had engaged community leaders to help suppress the spread of the virus and improve vaccination rates during the pandemic.

The chair of the government’s CALD COVID-19 advisory task force Lucas De Toca said it had “done a lot of targeted, specific work” with migrant communities, including Middle Eastern populations.