‘I’ve Lost 37 Friends To Coronavirus – And 36 Were Black’
On a day in late March, Hesketh Benoit received a phone call from his friend, the reggae singer Delroy Washington.
When Delroy told him he was calling from hospital, Hesketh asked him if it was possible he had coronavirus.
He told me: “Oh no man, don’t worry about that. It’s not that. I’m OK. I’m just not feeling right,’” recalls Hesketh, 62, a retired lecturer. “He honestly did not think it was Covid at all.”
But as the pair chatted, Hesketh noticed his friend was gasping a bit and sounded chesty. “He wasn’t coughing, but he was breathing deeper. So I told him I’d call him later when he’d got settled.
“He asked me to bring him some fruit to the hospital such as mangoes, apples and pears and I promised him I would.”
But just hours later, a shocked Hesketh received a telephone call – this time from the hospital, to say that his friend had passed away.
“I was probably the last person he spoke to,” says Hesketh. “That was devastating, emotional and touching to know.”
Delroy Washington died at the age of 68 after a brief illness that was confirmed to be coronavirus.
“It was a real shocker,” admits Hesketh, who lives in Haringey, London, and has an active role in the community including youth work and being head coach for Haringey Basketball.
But Delroy’s death wasn’t the only coronavirus death of someone he knew. And in the early months of the crisis, he became acutely aware that the virus seemed to be disproportionately attacking Black people.
Just days after Delroy Washington’s death, Hesketh’s friend Douglas Williams, who was affectionately known as “Brother Dougie”, also died of coronavirus. He was in his late fifties.
Hesketh told HuffPost UK that after losing a number of Black friends to coronavirus in quick succession early on in the pandemic, he knew something wasn’t right. So he started to keep count of the people he knew dying of coronavirus.
That death tally now stands at 37. And 36 of them were...
