Health Notes

Online petition demands more comprehensive breakdown of those infected by coronavirus in Canada

by Charlie Smith on April 14th, 2020 at 4:47 AM
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      Virtually every day, provincial or federal officials appear in front of journalists to offer bare-bones statistics on the extent of COVID-19 in Canada.

      The number of positive test results, fatalities, recoveries, and broad geographic areas where these have occurred are dutifully reported.

      If there's an outbreak in a long-term care home, the public is also notified.

      All of this conveys a sense of transparency, which is being reinforced by the media.

      But to date, Canadians have not been given a detailed breakdown of the ages of those who've died.

      Nor has there been any information released about the race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status of people who've contracted the illness.

      An online petition seeks to change that.

      "With the infection spreading at an exponential rate across the country, it is important to know who is receiving care and who is not," it states. "Data collection plays an essential role in the identification of vulnerabilities that may be fatal in the distribution of care and treatment for the novel virus patients."

      As of this writing, 813 people have attached their names to the petition, which readily acknowledges that the coronavirus doesn't care about race, ethnicity, or class.

      "However, we know our healthcare system and social infrastructures do," it emphasizes, "thus driving marginalized communities to be further disproportionately affected and underserved."

      It notes that in Chicago, people of African American ancestry account for 72 percent of deaths from COVID-19, even though they comprise only 32 percent of the population.

      "Comparatively, there is no Canadian data that analyzes testing, treatment and mortality based on identity markers," the petition states. "For future strategizing on public health responses, we need to understand how identity markers are impacting mortality rates within the population now." 

      The Straight's homeless blogger, Stanley Q. Woodvine, has been chronicling the challenges of staying healthy on his Twitter feed when there's no access for people like him to washrooms in restaurants, coffee shops, libraries, and almost all community centres.

      Meanwhile, Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis and two other researchers recently posted an unrefereed preprint of an article on medRxiv evaluating the relative risk of COVID-19 among people under 65 years old.

      He was able to show that in two states and New York City, this risk is substantially higher than in eight European countries because all of those nations released a detailed age breakdown of those who succumbed to the disease.

      To date, this type of data is still unavailable in Canada after 780 deaths and 25,680 positive test results (as of this writing).

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