Fundraisers walk 11,000km for families of bereaved Filipino health workers

A team of around 100 are collectively travelling the distance from the UK to the Philippines.

Fundraisers are walking, running and swimming nearly 7,000 miles to raise money for the families of Filipino frontline workers who have died from Covid-19 in the UK.

There has been a disproportionately high number of deaths among Filipinos working in the NHS and care services during the coronavirus pandemic, with claims that Filipinos have the highest death rate of staff in the sector.

Bianca Hanbury-Morris, who is half British and half Filipino, launched a fundraising effort, Balik Bayani, to help the families of those who have died by gathering a team of people to collectively walk the distance from the UK to the Philippines.

She told the PA news agency: “I thought, what’s the distance of the UK to the Philippines?

“Let’s get that emotional insight because these healthcare workers travelled a bloody long way from home for a better life to support the family members back home, and that’s 11,000km (6,835 miles).

“So we thought, let’s symbolically travel – whether that’s exercising, jogging, walking – the 11,000km back to the Philippines, that journey that they couldn’t make back home that final time.”

Of 188 frontline health and care deaths verified for the PA news agency, 28 (15%) were people of Filipino heritage.

Official figures indicate that about 18,500 Filipinos worked in the NHS in England as of March 2019, roughly 1.5% of an estimated 1.2 million total workforce.

Ms Hanbury-Morris, who works in marketing, was living in Dublin until recently but moved to Singapore before the start of lockdown because of her husband’s work.