Riz Ahmed has lost two family members to COVID-19

MUMBAI: "Venom" star Riz Ahmed has revealed he has lost two family members to COVID-19.

"I have lost two family members to Covid. I just want to believe their deaths and all the others aren't for nothing. We gotta step up to re-imagine a better future," Ahmed, who was born in London to a British Pakistani family, told GQ Hype, reports dailymail.co.uk.

"I'm seeing reports of India, where the government are calling it 'corona-jihad' and they're trying to blame it on the spread of Muslims and they are segregating hospitals between Muslims and non-Muslims," the 37-year-old added.

"Trump is using it as an excuse to try to ban immigration and the Hungarian government is centralising power off the back of this.

"I'm looking at the fact it's hitting African-Americans twice as hard; I'm looking at the fact that 50 per cent of NHS frontline workers - is it 50 per cent? - are ethnic minorities."

People from black, Asian or ethnic minority backgrounds make up 44 per cent of NHS medical staff according to the most recent figures, reports dailymail.co.uk.

"Who are the people who, for every moment of crisis in this country, have kept this country together?

"It's the people at the bottom of the barrel; the people being hit hardest by this pandemic," he said.

"We say we love the NHS more than the royal family, more than the Army, but do we love the people who keep the NHS alive?

'Because every time we tell people to f*** off back to where they came from, that's not what we're saying.

'So I really hope that this revelation, this awakening, opens our minds to that reality, to the stupidity of our prejudice."

Ahmed continued: "Coronavirus is on some level an alien invasion, isn't it? It's bringing humanity together against the common enemy.

"So there is this potential for this momentous, unique-in-the-history-of-our-species moment, of us all going through this crazy challenge together and only being able to get through this together.

"And yet, in the midst of that, insofar as any crisis is a mirror, reflecting your priorities and patterns, this crisis is reflecting and revealing the faultlines in our society, the broken records that are stuck in our head, the f***eries and the power plays that are still dominating how we are running our planet, the rising intolerance."