By Caroline Pailliez
(REUTERS) VALENTON, France, June 15 (Reuters) – Every week, Mamadou Diagouraga comes to the Muslim section of a cemetery near Paris to stand vigil at the grave of his father, one of the many French Muslims to have died from COVID-19. Diagouraga looks up from his father’s plot at the freshly-dug graves alongside. “My father was the first one in this row, and in a year, it’s filled up,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.” While France is estimated to have the European Union’s largest Muslim population, it does not know how hard that group has been hit: French law forbids the gathering of data based on ethnic or religious affiliations.
But evidence collated by Reuters – including statistical data that indirectly captures the impact and testimony from community leaders – indicates the COVID death rate among French Muslims is much higher than in the overall population.
According to one study based on official data, excess deaths in 2020 among French residents born in mainly Muslim North Africa were twice as high as among people born in France.
The reason, community leaders and researchers say, is that Muslims tend to have a lower-than-average socio-economic status.
