Death rates among immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa doubled in France and tripled in the Paris region at the height of France’s coronavirus outbreak, finds a study from the French government’s statistics agency. The INSEE agency’s findings, published on Tuesday, are the closest France has come to acknowledging with numbers the disproportionate impact of the virus on the country’s black immigrants and members of other overlooked minority groups. The study is the first in France to cross-reference the deaths that occurred in March and April when intensive care units were full with Covid-19 patients, with regions of origin. The research, highlighting the dramatic increases in deaths among immigrants born in Africa and Asia, is seen as helping to fill gaps in France’s understanding of its minority communities. French researchers hailed the study as an important step but also said it only began to scratch the surface of how the pandemic was affecting France’s minorities, often people who lived in crowded, underprivileged, neighbourhoods. French black rights activists have long pushed for more and better ethnic-specific data. The topic has become an increasingly urgent issue for French administrators following the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the death of George Floyd in the US. Officially, the French republic is “colour blind” and does not categorise or count people by race or ethnicity. But critics say that that guiding philosophy has made the state oblivious to discrimination and put minorities at additional risk. Solene Brun, a sociologist specialising in race and inequality, said: “I’m delighted, and I know colleagues are delighted, because we have been waiting for this data. But our enthusiasm is tempered by the fact that this concerns only countries of origin. It’s not looking at black populations or north African and Asian populations in their entirety.” The study had shed no light on how French-born children of immigrants were faring in the pandemic, although the report, pointing to high death rates among their foreign-born parents, suggested that minorities, especially black people from Africa, could have disproportionately borne much of the brunt of the disease in France. Sylvie le Minez, head of INSEE’s department of demographic studies, said: “They have very clearly been hard hit. That is undeniable.” Evidence from Britain and the US indicating a greater Covid-19 mortality risk for black residents than white has increased pressure for French studies. Researchers have said their hands have been tied by French taboos against identifying people by race or ethnicity and by legislation regulating the scope of research and data collection. “France doesn’t do ethnic-racial statistics, but we have the country of birth,” Le Minez said. “That is already very, very, illuminating.” INSEE researchers used data from the French civil registry of births, deaths and marriages to examine countries of origin of those who had died during the March-April peak of the coronavirus outbreak. In total France has reported about 30,000 coronavirus-related deaths since the pandemic started. The research findings were particularly alarming for the Paris region, especially in the densely populated and underprivileged northern reaches of the French capital. Compared to March-April of 2019, Paris-region deaths during the same two months this year shot up by 134% among north African immigrants and by 219% for people born elsewhere in Africa. Skewed death rates were even more pronounced in Seine-Saint-Denis, the northern outskirts of Paris long troubled by poverty and overcrowding. There, deaths increased by 95% among the French-born, but by 191% among people born in north Africa and by 368% among those from sub-Saharan Africa.