The Bradford neighbourhood where Covid 'ran rampant'

• By Sam Casey

You don't have to spend very long in the West Bowling area of Bradford to encounter people who have personal experience of the devastation caused by the pandemic.

At the entrance to Bowling Park, local resident Abdul Majid reflects on the anguish of the last year.

'So many people have died and it's so shocking,' he says.

Abdul admits that he initially dismissed Covid as a 'joke', until it swept through his family.

A number of his relatives became seriously ill. His father, Abdul Saboor, spent two months in a coma but survived.

But his uncle, Nawab Ali, lost his life.

'It started making sense, but it was just very late,' Abdul says regretfully.

He believes people in the area are finally beginning to take the pandemic seriously. But for other near neighbours the reality of the outbreak became personal very early on.

'You just wake up each morning and think, was it a dream?' says Terri Haigh, recalling her own experience.

Terri lost her father, Ron, to coronavirus at the start of the crisis. He was one of Bradford's first confirmed victims. Just weeks earlier her mum, Angie, had died suddenly from an unrelated health condition.

She describes that period as 'the end of my world'.

'Within three weeks I was orphaned. I just really miss them,' she says, struggling to hold back the tears.

Terri's grief was compounded by the fact that she was unable to attend her father's funeral because of lockdown restrictions, instead having to watch his service online.

Likewise, Shadim Hussain and his family couldn't pay their respects in the normal way when his mother, Kazeem Begum, died in November.

He says there was a five-to-six-week period when there seemed to be a string of deaths from Covid.

'I think it's just the nature of the virus,' he says. 'Once it infiltrates into family networks and communities then it has a very high risk of rapidly spreading.'

Data on how covid affects individual neighbourhoods isn't readily available, so it's difficult to say conclusively whether West Bowling has been particularly hard-hit.

But the sheer number of stories of loss suggest that this is a community that has been unusually vulnerable to the impact of the pandemic.

Shahid Islam, a resident of West Bowling and a researcher at the Bradford Institute for Health Research, says the area has been 'disproportionately affected'.

But he believes that the pandemic has merely exposed issues that already existed.

'Covid runs rampant in areas where there are already existing health inequalities,' he says.

'Covid came here and really magnified some of those and really put a spotlight that these are the issues that we need to do something about if we are to create a healthy and happy society.'

As Bradford counts the cost of more than a thousand lives lost, there is still a need to answer the questions about why the toll paid by neighbourhoods, like West Bowling, has been especially high.