IT’S A familiar format for social media message-type videos. The faces staring down the lens, slightly haunted, the emotive words as the solo piano builds, and the stark white on black captions at the end.

One doing the rounds this week #youclapformenow has caused me to reapply the mascara for my work Zoom calls at least three times already. The faces are those of key workers – mostly doctors, nurses, delivery drivers, dentists, care workers, shop workers – who wake up every morning and go into battle with the invisible enemy that is Covid-19. But something about those faces makes the lump in my throat explode every time. And I want to try to understand why.

Most of them are black or brown immigrants, or sons and daughters of immigrants. They remind me of my friends from university circa 1985. We have a WhatsApp group and have kept in touch after our last reunion of the Glasgow University Asian Students' Association.

We are the children of the first major wave of Asian immigration to Scotland in the 1960s. We had the casual racism in the streets, the strict parents, the double eastern/western lifestyles, so we had lots to talk about.

The majority are doctors, but there are teachers, dentists, pharmacists, lawyers, and at least two women’s aid workers. For Asian parents the very pinnacle of success was measured by whether your child was a doctor.

So there was much chat in our households along the lines of: “What are you going to study? Medicine, medicine or medicine?”

They would not have expected the prejudice that some face in their surgeries or in hospital wards by patients who would rather be treated by someone "British".

Our parents saw it as a truly noble job, a respected profession. Doctors made a real difference to people’s lives, and it helped that the salary was decent and there was job security to boot.

And, frankly, if you weren’t in the medical profession you always had the slight whiff of disappointment hanging about you at social events.

But now, a new emotion stalks those pushy parents' dreams: Fear.

On our WhatsApp chat and on social media, as this pandemic has gathered in its deadliness so the messages from those at the frontline have painfully evolved.

Alarm screams from their words. Members of their families, who are also medical staff, are ill, they themselves are ill, they are begging for the right equipment.

They try their damnedest to maintain that measured tone they’ve spent most of their adult lives perfecting, so much so that it leaves those of us not on the frontline – normally the most opinionated of people so it seems – oddly muzzled, able only to type a heart, kiss or some other equally limp response.

Occasionally we try humour but that usually gets the WhatsApp response equivalent of everyone studying their shoes.

The medics could see what was coming. They’d read or listened to the words of their Italian colleagues. They knew that as the number of cases coming into hospitals and GP surgeries grew, without adequate personal protection equipment they would become the 21st century equivalent of the soldiers ordered to go “over the top” during the First World War.

A few weeks ago, my dad’s Iraqi-born surgeon phoned to tell my mother he would see my father back at the hospital in six months and added “…if we are still here.”

He meant the medical staff dealing with my dad. My mum rubbed away a tear as she offered her own equivalent of a heart emoji: “I’ll pray for you.”

I look at the faces of so many of the frontline staff who have died in the UK – again people born elsewhere but who had made this country their home, and their offspring and wonder why, for the size of population, they have paid such a heavy price.

Some argue it is genetics, some argue it is their hesitation to say no to long hours, some that it’s a mere coincidence. Some even say it’s "racist" to focus on ethnic minority frontline staff only, which is to wholly misunderstand what racism is.

The reason why the #youclapformenow video makes me weep is not just because I ‘know' the faces in it, it’s because, after what seems like four or five years of division and nastiness in our political and social discourse due to Brexit it feels like maybe, unlike the 3.6 million Indians who fought for Britain during the First and Second World Wars and the 163,000 who died fighting, the contribution of immigrant frontline workers who fought this battle will be recognised and remembered in the future.

All columnists are free to express their opinions. They don’t necessarily represent the view of The Herald.