Deprivation has stronger link with coronavirus death rates than any ethnicity - health boss

But Dr David Rosser, chief executive of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, said the data is difficult to unpick.

It comes after a new report suggested that 35 per cent of critically ill coronavirus patients in the UK are from black or ethnic minority backgrounds – more than double their representation in the population.

Dr Rosser told a West Midlands Combined Authority briefing: "We do record ethnicity in hospitals as part of the admission criteria, there are a proportion of patients that choose not to answer.

"In terms of what we are seeing in the UHB patients when we do look at the mortality, we are seeing a stronger relationship with deprivation than any given ethnicity.

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"Of course there is an overlap sadly between ethnicity and deprivation, so it's slightly difficult to unpick, we are also aware certain ethnic groups have a higher rate of renal failure, diabetes, hypertension, all of which we know are significant risk factors for doing badly if you contract Covid-19 in the first place."

Dr Rosser is in charge of Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Heartlands Hospital, Good Hope Hospital, Sutton Coldfield Hospital and the new Nightingale Hospital in Birminhgam.

Birmingham City Council's cabinet member for health and social care, Paulette Hamilton, said that deprivation is a "major issue".

She said: "Data given incorrectly can cause more issues than it actually solves and people in the communities want answers.

"At this moment there is lots of fear, they don't understand why they in certain communities feel as if they're dying more than other communities.

"Deprivation is a major issue, people need to understand what these inequalities are, they need to understand where poverty accounts for some of what's going on and in Birmingham.

"We feel that this issue is going to ramble on and if we don't start to get really clear concise information out there, things could then become quite difficult.

"We need to find a way that these figures can be much more easily interpreted."

Sue Ibbotson, Public Health England's director in the West Midlands, added: "The chief medical officer has commissioned PHE to analyse the ethnicity data to measure the impact of Covid-19 across different groups.

"There is limited recording of ethnicity across almost all the data sets that we have and they don't all come together in one place at the moment, so we have to be very careful in making any assumptions and it is of course a really important issue and we're doing a whole raft of really detailed and careful work before we draw any conclusions about that.

"In addition we're working nationally and with local partners to ensure that ethnic minorities are informed and are confident about how they can stay safe."