Via The Globe and Mail: Race-based data crucial in combatting COVID-19, experts say. Excerpt:
For much of the pandemic, Dr. Madhu Jawanda struggled to get a clear picture of how the virus was spreading in racialized communities in B.C.’s Lower Mainland.
The province’s health authority was refusing to release race-based data on COVID-19 cases, citing fears that the information would stigmatize neighbourhoods that had high infection rates. So Dr. Jawanda and other members of the South Asian COVID Task Force, a group she co-founded that supports COVID-19 prevention and education in South Asian communities, began gathering their own.
“We didn’t have a choice. We were like, ‘Okay, how can we figure this out?’ ” she said.
The task force compared ethnic data from the 2016 census with information about outbreaks across the Lower Mainland to deduce how they were impacting South Asians and other racialized populations. They reached out to community leaders for help understanding the situation on the ground. From there, they developed videos, infographics and virtual town halls in languages such as Hindi and Punjabi.
And then, in May, they received some assistance from an unexpected source. The Vancouver Sun obtained leaked reports containing neighbourhood-level data on COVID-19 case counts and vaccination rates from the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC). The leaked information confirmed much of the work that Dr. Jawanda and her fellow task force members had already done themselves. COVID-19 cases, they now knew beyond a doubt, were clustered in neighbourhoods with racialized populations.
After more than a year of calls from public-health experts and journalists for B.C. health officials to release neighbourhood-level information about infection and vaccination rates in the province, the BCCDC data leak made plain the way COVID-19 was disproportionately affecting lower-income communities of colour. In the months since, the leak has prompted a new conversation among public-health officials and advocates about whether keeping such data under wraps was ever a good idea.
Now, experts and advocates say that further transparency, through race-based data collection, could prove crucial in combatting current and future public-health emergencies.
Despite concerns about stigmatizing racialized communities, community groups and public health officials say B.C.’s data leak has proved to be a positive development. They say having official data to back up their efforts has helped them overcome skepticism among members of the public.
“I think this is a watershed moment for Canada in terms of transparency not being harmful, but actually being helpful,” said David Fisman, an infectious disease specialist and member of Ontario’s COVID-19 Science Advisory Table.
After the May leak, the B.C. government began releasing some neighbourhood-level data regularly. Dr. Jawanda found herself wishing that her team could have had access to this information when they first began their education efforts.
If they had, she said, the task force would have been able to mobilize more quickly and with more precision to address the dire toll of the second wave – and potentially save lives in the process. Instead, it them took months of work to understand the severity of the pandemic’s impact on South Asian communities and bring crucial COVID-19 prevention and vaccination information to those most at risk.
Dr. Jawanda said it wasn’t that surprising to her when Surrey, which is home to many racialized and low-income people, proved to be the hardest-hit city in B.C., according to the leaked reports. The city represented 10 per cent of the provincial population, but 29 per cent of COVID-19 cases.
