But politicians afraid to tackle the problem 'in case they look racist'
More than 90 per cent of the most severely ill coronavirus patients in Germany have a 'migrant background' according to German news website Bild.
Thomas Voshaar, the head doctor at a German lung hospital, said a survey of leading medics had found that many of the sickest patients were what he described as "patients with communications barriers"
In a conference call with health experts, Voshaar said he had raised the issue with Angela Merkel's health minister Jens Spahn - while the head of Germany's top diseases institute, Lothar Wieler, described it as a 'taboo'. Bild reports.
Wieler added that the number of Muslims in intensive care was "clearly above 50 per cent" even though they make up only 4.8% of Germany's 83million population. Voshaar told the conference call that government warnings about the dangers of the virus were 'simply not getting through' to migrant communities.
He said top doctors had compiled figures from intensive care wards in November and December 2020 and January 2021, the peak months of the second wave saying "According to my analysis, more than 90 per cent of the intubated, most seriously ill patients always had a migrant background," Voshaar said that everyone he had spoken to about his findings, including health minister Spahn, had reacted with a sense of 'oh God'.
Experts on the conference call are said to have "raised fears that the German government was avoiding confronting the issue for fear of triggering a racism debate." Merkel is not thought to have discussed the issue in her regular meetings with state premiers. Migrants and integration are a sensitive political issue in Germany, which unilaterally took in more than a million people from Syria in 2015.
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