‘Why not us?’: Asylum seekers on COVID-19 front lines demand permanent residency

2020/08/17 Leave a comment

All too predictable, the understandable debates over who’s in and who’s out, which happens with respect to most government programs, whether immigration or other:

Doll Jean Frejus Nguessan Bi says he couldn’t sleep at all last night.

The asylum seeker from Ivory Coast works as a security guard in hospitals and long-term care homes in the Montreal area, where he watched many of his colleagues stop coming in as deaths linked to COVID-19 began to mount this spring.

But while Nguessan Bi kept working, he said he found out Friday that he would be excluded from a new government program to fast-track the permanent residency applications of some asylum seekers working on the front lines during the pandemic.

“Why (not) us? We who gave our hearts and our love… Why are we abandoned?” he said in an interview at a protest camp across the street from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Montreal riding office Saturday. “What did we do to deserve this?”

Ottawa announced Friday that asylum seekers working in specific jobs in the health-care sector would be eligible for permanent residency without first having to wait for their asylum claims to be accepted, as is typically the process.

Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino said the move came in response to public demand for so-called “Guardian Angels” — many in Quebec — to be recognized for their work.

“They demonstrated a uniquely Canadian quality in that they were looking out for others and so that is why is today is so special,” Mendicino said in an interview Friday afternoon.

But asylum seekers and their supporters say Ottawa’s plan excludes thousands of workers without permanent status in Canada who have laboured on the front lines during the pandemic, often at great personal risk to themselves and their families.

That includes security guards and janitorial staff, factory workers, and farm labourers, among others.

“I have friends who worked with me in security that abandoned (their posts) because they were afraid of getting infected. But I stayed,” said Nguessan Bi.

He said he wants Trudeau and Quebec Premier Francois Legault to do something to help asylum seekers who are not eligible for the new program.

Several dozen people rallied in front of Trudeau’s office on Saturday to demand permanent residency for all asylum seekers.

“It’s an act of recognition. They deserve status,” Joseph Clormeus, a member of Debout pour la dignite, a Montreal advocacy group that organized the rally, told the crowd.

Anite Presume, a Haitian asylum seeker who came to Quebec in August 2017 from the United States, was among the protesters.

She works in a medication factory, and said she kept working during the pandemic despite the risks.

“To take the bus, we were all stressed, but we still went to work because it was essential. They needed medication for the hospitals,” she said in an interview.

She said she has not received a response yet to her application for asylum in Canada, and lives under a cloud of uncertainty and stress about her future.

“It’s a feeling of rejection,” Presume said, about not being included in Ottawa’s regularization program. “They rejected us as if we did nothing.”

To apply for residency under the new program, applicants must have claimed asylum in Canada prior to March 13 and have spent no less than 120 hours working as an orderly, nurse or another designated occupation between the date of their claim and Aug. 14.

They must also demonstrate they have six months of experience in the profession before they can receive permanent residency and have until the end of August 2021 to meet that requirement.

The program was the result of negotiations between the federal government and Quebec, who have had a strained relationship on the question of immigration, and in particular the asylum claimants, in recent years.

Public support has been building for asylum seekers’ demand for permanent residency after it was revealed that refugee claimants were among those toiling in Quebec’s long-term care facilities, which were hard-hit by COVID-19.

Source: ‘Why not us?’: Asylum seekers on COVID-19 front lines demand permanent residency

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COVID-19 Impact on Immigration to Canada: June 2020 update

2020/08/17 Leave a comment

The deck examines the impact of COVID-19 on immigration to Canada: Permanent Residents, Temporary Workers, Students, Citizenship and Visitor Visas updated with June data and web data for key programs.
Key observations:
  • Immigration continued bounce back compared to May and overall quarter save for TRs
  • PRs: From 10,950 in May to 19,180. June Year-over-year decline: Greater gap between Economic only -22.6% compared to Family -69.0%, Refugees -80.2%
  • Provincial Nominee Program: Increase from 2,970 in May to 4,940. June Year-over-year decline smaller than May: -30.9%
  • TR to PRs transition: Increase from 5,820 in May to 12,955. Year-over-year increase of 39.8% (i.e., those already in Canada)
  • TRs/IMP: Ongoing decline from 15,700 in May to 13,950. June Year-over-year decline: Agreements -51.0%, Canadian Interests -46.3%
  • TRs/TFWP: Stable— 9,365 in May compared to 9,200. June Year-over-year decline: Caregivers -64.5%, Agriculture -8.9%, Other LMIA -50.1%
  • Students: Decline from 30,785 in May to 16,000. June Year-over-year decrease: 32.8%
  • Citizenship: Increase from virtually none in May (53) to 1,656. June Year-over-year decrease: 92.0%.(2019 monthly average was about 20,000)
  • Visitor Visas: Complete shutdown. China authorizations declined faster and sharper
  • IRCC Website interest (July, Work and study permits, settlement services and citizenship) broadly reflect these trends)

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B.C. survey shows racialized people most likely to suffer from effects of COVID-19 pandemic

2020/08/15 Leave a comment

Confirming patterns elsewhere:

An official survey shows the tumult created in B.C. by the novel coronavirus has hurt racialized people the most, with more than one in five Latin American, West Asian and Black respondents reporting job losses due to the pandemic.

Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry said at Thursday’s daily COVID-19 briefing that the results of a recent online survey of 394,000 people confirmed a trend seen in many other places: The virus and the measures taken to slow its growth have disproportionately affected non-white people. The results did not touch on who has been infected, but charted how people of different ethnicities have fared with regards to unemployment, financial stress, and access to health care and food.

“The challenge has not been shared equally,” she said as she revealed the results of the survey done by the BC Centre for Disease Control, a government agency.

The information comes as British Columbia logs an additional 78 confirmed cases of the virus. The numbers have been creeping up all summer, leading to a recent spike that Dr. Henry says is driven by younger people socializing.

The provincial average for losing a job due to the pandemic was 15.5 per cent, according to the survey. Only white respondents reported recent unemployment at below that rate, 14 per cent. People of every other ethnicity reported rates above the provincial average, with the highest affecting Latin American people at 22.6 per cent, West Asian or Arabic people (21.5 per cent), and Black people (21.1 per cent).

That same inequality was seen when respondents were asked about whether they had more money troubles. The provincial average was 32 per cent of respondents saying they had increased financial problems, with 29 per cent of white people reporting these issues.

Neither Dr. Henry nor the provincial health ministry explained why Indigenous respondents were not represented in the survey results released on Thursday.

Japanese, multi-ethnic and Korean respondents were the most likely to report difficulty accessing health care. On the other hand, Latin American, Southeast Asian and Black respondents were the most likely to report feeling more connected to family since the province began its state of emergency in March.

The survey also showed people at the income level of less than $60,000 reported having a harder time meeting their financial needs and putting enough food on the table, and that they were more likely to be out of work.

Among respondents with school-aged children, lower-income households reported more stress on their kids, more barriers to learning and a decreased connection to their friends.

At Thursday’s briefing, Health Minister Adrian Dix and Dr. Henry spent most of their time addressing the increase in cases. Mr. Dix warned anyone ignoring physical distancing at parties this weekend that public-health inspectors will be out enforcing rules at bars and banquet halls.

Since early July, people in their 20s have made up the highest proportion of new cases, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada. From July 29 to Aug. 4, more than 40 per cent of cases nationally for which data were available were reported in people 29 or younger.

In B.C., this group accounts for about 32 per cent of cases since July 1, while people in their 30s make up about 22 per cent. In Alberta, people in their 20s make up the largest proportion of active cases, at 22 per cent, while people in their 30s followed with 19 per cent.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-bc-survey-shows-racialized-people-most-likely-to-suffer-from-effects/

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#COVID-19: Comparing provinces with other countries 12 August Update

2020/08/13 Leave a comment

Latest update. No major change in ranking although numbers in some of the hardest hit countries continue to increase.

 

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Ottawa must put data first and tie to health funding

2020/08/11 Leave a comment

Agree in principle but politically hard to achieve (Quebec doesn’t even automatically share its data with CIHI):

The federal government looks yet again about to transfer billions of dollars to the provinces with essentially no strings attached.

We’ve seen this before with $40 billion in the 2004 First Ministers’ Health Accord and then $11 billion in the 2017 Health Accord, both highlighting home care, without evidence of significant progress.

And the prime minister just announced $19 billion for the Safe Restart Program, though without any details, especially as to what the federal government receives in return.

One major quid pro quo could address Canada’s profound lack of high-quality data, especially highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. While U.S. analysts are able in near real time to estimate and project COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths down to the county level, Canada is barely able to produce comparable data by province.

Some of this $19 billion is meant for COVID testing and tracing, and improvements in long-term care.

A major failing in the tragic and disproportionate COVID-19 mortality rates in nursing homes was due to poor staffing levels, an issue that has been known for decades and pointed out in myriad reports and studies. But there are essentially no comparable and complete national data in this area.

As strongly recommended in the recent Royal Society of Canada report, high quality data on current staffing levels, connected at the individual level to health outcomes, are essential, especially for the federal government to develop the evidence-based national standards for long-term care so many have been calling for.

The provinces have typically argued that health care is a provincial jurisdiction, so the federal government cannot compel them to provide sorely needed data. However, in another example, we have had almost two decades of cajoling the provinces with federally funded Canada Health Infoway paying at least half the cost to develop and implement standardized and interoperable software systems for electronic health records.

Most relevant for the current pandemic, Infoway was specifically tasked with producing a system for anticipating and dealing with infectious disease outbreaks. This system, had it been working even 15 years after its initial funding in 2004, would have enabled a very different outcome this year, likely with far fewer cases and deaths from COVID-19.

Paper agreements and cajoling the provinces with optional subsidies have clearly failed. It’s time for a much tougher stance.

The federal government has the necessary constitutional powers, including explicit jurisdiction for statistics, criminal law, spending powers, and the general peace, order and good government (POGG) power, to compel the collection and flows of 21st century kinds of data.

Monique Bégin, as federal minister of health, successfully ended the practice of physicians’ extra-billing by amending the Canada Health Act to deduct any extra billing from an offending province’s fiscal transfer. The Supreme Court has just upheld the federal government’s genetic privacy legislation as constitutional despite objections from Quebec.

In the current pandemic emergency, high-quality, standardized, real-time data on “excess deaths,” COVID cases and hospitalizations, and details on the operations of the thousands of nursing homes and retirement residences across Canada are essential.

For nursing homes, we need these data to learn why some were completely successful in avoiding any novel coronavirus cases amongst residents and staff, while others suffered tragically. In turn, such statistical information will provide the federal government the strong evidence base needed to take the lead in establishing national standards for nursing home staffing levels, though action on staffing must not wait for perfect data.

And once we have standardized individual-level data on COVID cases, including factors like age, sex, neighbourhood, other diseases, individuals’ household composition, race, hospitalization rates, disease severity, and deaths, as the U.K. has been able to do for 17 million of its residents in near real time, then Canada will be able to support far more sophisticated analysis and projections to deal with the current top pandemic issues — not least, whether to open bars or schools.

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Children Can Get Severe COVID-19, CDC Says — Especially Black And Hispanic Children

2020/08/10 Leave a comment

Another example of racial disparities. While the study did not include socioeconomic factors, these likely explain part of the differences:

While most children who catch the coronavirus have either no symptoms or mild ones, they are still at risk of developing “severe” symptoms requiring admission to an intensive care unit, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a new report released Friday.

Hispanic and Black children in particular were much more likely to require hospitalization for COVID-19, with Hispanic children about eight times as likely as white children to be hospitalized, while Black children were five times as likely.

Despite persistent rumors that children are “almost immune” from the virus, the analysis of 576 children hospitalized for the virus across 14 states found that one out of three was admitted to the ICU — similar to the rate among adults. Almost 1 in 5 of those were infants younger than 3 months. The most common symptoms included fever and chills, inability to eat, nausea and vomiting.

The findings come as school districts across the country are figuring out how to educate the nation’s children while still protecting kids, teachers and family members from the ravages of the virus. The American Federation of Teachers has said it considers in-person schooling to be safe only when fewer than 5% of coronavirus tests in an area are positive.

Researchers don’t fully understand why some racial groups are hospitalized at higher rates than others. But the CDC’s findings are consistent with other studies, the authors of the report said, citing a recent analysis from the Baltimore-District of Columbia region that found that Hispanics had more COVID-19 infections than other groups.

“It has been hypothesized that Hispanic adults might be at increased risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection because they are overrepresented in frontline (e.g., essential and direct-service) occupations with decreased opportunities for social distancing, which might also affect children living in those households,” the CDC researchers wrote.

Underlying medical conditions might have contributed to the children’s hospitalization, researchers wrote, noting that Hispanic and Black children are more likely to suffer from conditions like obesity.

If there’s any good news, it’s that even among children hospitalized with severe COVID-19 complications, the fatality rate remains low, researchers said.

A separate study in the journal Pediatrics also found racial and socioeconomic disparities in children and young adults tested for COVID-19 in Washington, D.C. Hispanic children were more than six times as likely as white children to test positive for the virus; Black children were over four times as likely.

Ultimately, the CDC concluded, it’s crucial to continue prevention efforts wherever children gather, specifically citing schools and child care centers.

Source: Children Can Get Severe COVID-19, CDC Says — Especially Black And Hispanic Children

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East Asians have Toronto’s lowest coronavirus infection rate. But other Asian groups are suffering badly

2020/08/08 Leave a comment

Good article and analysis of the Toronto race-based COVID-19 data

  • Toronto’s ethnic Chinese are weathering the epidemic well – yet it’s a much different story for Filipinos, South Asians and all other non-whites

  • Wide disparities are also reflected according to income, with experts suggesting socio-economic factors like racism and poverty are likely at play, not genetics

North American Covid-19 statistics that group Asian communities together have suggested they are experiencing relatively low infection rates – but new data out of Toronto indicates sharp differences among Chinese, Filipino and other Asian groups in the city.

Toronto’s large East Asian population, which overwhelmingly consists of ethnic Chinese, has the lowest rate of infection among all ethnicities.

But all other Asian groups have been hit hard. Southeast Asians, consisting mostly of ethnic Filipinos, have an infection rate more than eight times higher than that of East Asians; the rate for South Asian Torontonians is more than five times East Asians’.

In fact, all other non-white groups have infection rates that exceed the East Asian rate by huge margins.

This chart shows the wide disparities in Covid-19 infection rates in Toronto, according to ethnicity, with East Asians experiencing the lowest rate and Latin Americans the highest. Graphic: Toronto Public Health
This chart shows the wide disparities in Covid-19 infection rates in Toronto, according to ethnicity, with East Asians experiencing the lowest rate and Latin Americans the highest. Graphic: Toronto Public Health

White Torontonians, meanwhile, have an infection rate that is a more modest 25 per cent higher than East Asians’ – still much lower than the rate for the whole of this diverse city.

Experts suspect that a combination of racism, behaviour and circumstance explains the stark differences among various ethnicities. The fact that wide disparities are also reflected in income-based infection rates suggests that socio-economic reasons are at play, not genetics, they say.

Widespread and early mask usage among East Asians could be a factor, said Dr Jason Kindrachuk, a University of Manitoba virologist who is studying Covid-19.
Covid-19 rate in Canada’s most Chinese city isn’t what racists might expect

But teasing apart causality would take time. “Is it as straightforward as income? Could this relate back to earlier community acceptance of things like masks or social distancing?” he asked.

Either way, the data is crucial to identifying communities that bear the greatest burden in the pandemic, said Kindrachuk.

“In Canada we talk about being a multi-ethnicity community, but we’re starting to identify just how different our communities are, how different the vulnerabilities are … so we need to think about how we provide services to those most in need.”

The Toronto data likely reflected the higher risks of certain jobs, those that relied heavily on non-white employees and were ill-suited to social distancing, Kindrachuk said.

Canada’s care industry has high numbers of Filipino workers, for example, while its meat processing and seasonal agricultural sectors employ many foreign workers from Mexico.

As well as suggesting communities most at risk, the ethnic data also stood in sharp contrast to what Kindrachuk called “shocking” racist rhetoric about “the ‘China virus’ [and the] implicit targeting of the East Asian, the Chinese communities, as being to blame for the virus”.

Poverty, racism and risk in Toronto

Previous data from New York and Los Angeles suggested that Asian residents of those cities had the lowest infection rates among various racial groups. But those US statistics lumped all Asians together, disguising any disparities within the group.

The Toronto data, presented by the city’s Medical Officer of Health Dr Eileen de Villa last Thursday and current to July 16, split up East Asians, Southeast Asians and South Asians. West Asians were grouped with Arab and Middle East people.

Separate census figures show that Toronto’s East Asian population is 84 per cent Chinese; ethnic Filipinos similarly dominate the Southeast Asian category, representing 79 per cent of the grouping.

East Asians had a Covid-19 rate of 40 infections per 100,000, far below the citywide rate of 145. They make up 13 per cent of the City of Toronto’s population of about 2.7 million – but less than 4 per cent of all infections.

This chart shows the wide disparities in Covid-19 infection rates in Toronto according to ethnicity, illustrated as percentages of total population and total infections. Graphic: Toronto Public Health
This chart shows the wide disparities in Covid-19 infection rates in Toronto according to ethnicity, illustrated as percentages of total population and total infections. Graphic: Toronto Public Health

The second-lowest infection rate (50 per 100,000) was among whites, who make up 48 per cent of the city’s population, and 17 per cent of infections.

Every other ethnic group has fared much worse.

The highest rates are among Latin Americans (481 per 100,000) and Arab/Middle Eastern/West Asians (454 per 100,000). Those communities are relatively small, at less than 3 and 4 per cent of the city respectively – but they suffered 10 per cent and 11 per cent of all Covid cases.

The larger populations of black Torontonians and Southeast Asians had identical infection rates of 334 per 100,000 people. Blacks make up about 9 per cent of the city, and Southeast Asians about 7 per cent, but experienced 21 and 17 per cent of all infections respectively.

South Asians (grouped with Indo-Caribbeans), had an infection rate of about 224 per 100,000. They make up about 13 per cent of Toronto, but have suffered 20 per cent of infections.

Canada has not been releasing race-based Covid-19 data on a national level, something critics call a blind spot.

But the Toronto data echoes previous geographical data from British Columbia, where the rate of Covid-19 infection in Richmond – the most ethnically Chinese city in the world outside Asia – has been the lowest in the metro Vancouver region.

In her presentation last week, Dr de Villa said there was “growing evidence … that racialised people and people living in lower-income households are more likely to be affected by COVID-19“.

“While the exact reasons for this have yet to be fully understood, we believe it is related to both poverty and racism,” she said.

She noted that 83 per cent of reported COVID-19 cases in Toronto involved a patient who identified as a member of a racialised group, compared to 52 per cent among the general population.

The race-based data from Toronto showed that “risk distribution was very unequal”, said Dr David Fisman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Toronto. But this could be an overlapping function of wealth and income, he said.

There were dramatic differences between infection rates depending on income, with the rate steeply declining as incomes rose. The infection rate among residents of households earning C$150,000 (US$113,000) or more was 24 per 100,000 – less than one-sixth the rate suffered by the lowest earners, on less than C$30,000 per year, at 160 infections per 100,000.

The risk of Covid-19 in Toronto declines steeply as income increases, this chart shows. Graphic: Toronto Public Health
The risk of Covid-19 in Toronto declines steeply as income increases, this chart shows. Graphic: Toronto Public Health

“We were seeing this anecdotally in hospitals; the lockdown extinguished spread [of Covid-19] in higher-income areas, as a lot of professionals with service jobs got to go online,” he said.

“Lower-income folks are more likely to be people of colour and more likely to be in essential in-person work,” such as jobs in factories, food processing or care facilities, Fisman said.

“We can see that the epidemic split off in Toronto into two epidemics: one for wealthier Torontonians, and another, more prolonged, epidemic for those of lesser economic means.”

Kindrachuk agreed – the income divide was “eye-opening”, he said. “If you have a high income, you likely are going to be able to weather the storm … there is a complete disparity between how the burden of this disease looks between high and low income brackets.”

As for genetics, Kindrachuk said he doubted that it explained the stark disparities among ethnicities. “I haven’t seen evidence that there is a difference” on a genetic basis, he said.

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#COVID-19: Comparing provinces with other countries 5 August Update

2020/08/06 Leave a comment

Latest update, along with chart for infections. Recent uptick in infections can be expected to lead to an uptick in deaths. No major change in ranking.

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ICYMI: Toronto’s marginalized communities disproportionately affected by coronavirus, data suggest

2020/08/05 Leave a comment

Better data on what we have seen worldwide:

COVID-19 has infected racialized and low-income people in Toronto at far higher rates than the general population outside of long-term care homes, data released by the city suggest.

Doctors, community organizations and public-health workers have long suspected that racialized people – especially those who are Black – have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. The findings released Thursday by Toronto Public Health showed that despite making up 52 per cent of the population, racialized people accounted for 83 per cent of COVID-19 cases between mid-May and mid-July.

The data reveal health inequities that existed long before the pandemic and will continue to if governments don’t look to address the upstream causes, experts say.

“Racism essentially sets up whether you’re able to have a life in which you can protect yourself from risk for any disease, including COVID, or whether you are forced into exposing yourself to risk,” said Arjumand Siddiqi, the Canada Research Chair in population health equity.

According to the data, Black people had the highest share of COVID-19 cases (21 per cent), followed by South Asian or Indo-Caribbean (20 per cent), Southeast Asian (17 per cent), white (17 per cent), Arab, Middle Eastern or West Asian (11 per cent), Latin American (10 per cent) and East Asian (4 per cent). All groups except white and East Asian were overrepresented based on the size of their overall population. Black people had six times the rate of COVID-19 cases compared with white people, while Latin American as well as Arab, Middle Eastern or West Asian populations had nine times the rate.

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The data from Toronto Public Health do not include long-term care and retirement home residents, as these people are not asked about their race or their income. The data also did not include Indigenous identities. The data were collected by public-health officials between May 20 and July 16 and provided voluntarily.

Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s medical officer of health, said targeted testing, improved communication and access to social supports – such as voluntary isolation sites for those infected with or exposed to COVID-19 – could address these stark inequities in the short term. But she emphasized the city must work to address the root causes.

“We need to focus on the social determinants of health, like affordable housing opportunities, access to employment and income supports and educational opportunities. And yes, we need to address systemic racism,” Dr. de Villa said.

Mayor John Tory said community organizations will be a key partner in identifying solutions.

“This includes engaging with local community groups to better understand risks and the concerns that residents in these areas have, so that we can work together with them to address those concerns,” Mr. Tory said.

Floydeen Charles-Fridal, the executive director of Caribbean African Canadian Social Services, said her organization, based in the northwest part of the city that’s home to one of its largest Black populations, does the sort of front-line work that has been chronically underfunded for years.

CAFCAN usually spends about $10,000 to $15,000 annually on food-related programming but instead spent nearly $40,000 in the first month of the pandemic on hot meals, food hampers and staff to prepare and deliver them. Food insecurity was already an issue in the neighbourhood but grew worse after lockdown-related job losses, Ms. Charles-Fridal said. A University of Toronto study published last fall found Black Canadians experience food insecurity at nearly twice the rate of white Canadians, even after adjusting for factors such as education, income and home ownership.

“It took COVID-19 and the murder of Black folks here and across the border for people to really understand how anti-Black racism is working,” Ms. Charles-Fridal said.

Studies have repeatedly shown that South Asians and Black people have much higher rates of diabetes and high blood pressure than the general population. For people with one of these underlying conditions who become infected with COVID-19, there is an elevated risk for more severe outcomes, including death.

Michelle Westin, a senior analyst at Black Creek Community Health Centre, which serves neighbourhoods with some of the highest rates of poverty, said she was not at all surprised by the data.

“We know that we have community members that are living in crowded apartment buildings, people who are working in the service and factory industries, people who are underemployed so they don’t have paid sick days,” Ms. Westin said. “So they’re working in positions that are putting them at greater risk for catching COVID.”

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In a report published after the Black Experiences in Healthcare Symposium held earlier this year in Toronto, organizers noted there were “disparities and inequities in health care access and delivery for racialized Canadians.”

Tracey Thompson, 52, experienced this first-hand. Ms. Thompson, who is Black, contracted COVID-19 in mid-March and still lives with serious long-term effects from the virus. She said she was turned away from the emergency room twice, and has not been able to see a doctor to get medication to relieve her symptoms, which are still present.

“I just haven’t been able to access health care in a reasonable fashion,” Ms. Thompson said. “I think that being Black and being a woman didn’t do me any favours in that.”

Toronto Public Health also reported Thursday that having a low income and living in crowded spaces were major risk factors for COVID-19: 27 per cent of cases were among those living in households of five or more, and 51 per cent of cases were among those living in low-income households.

The two are closely connected, Ms. Charles-Fridal said. “When people have low income what that also suggests is they may very well be in [public] housing and living in places where they cannot practice physical distancing.”

Earlier this month, a group of homeless people and activist organizations filed an application with the Superior Court calling a bylaw that bans tents and camping in city parks unconstitutional. Evicting people from parks, they said, would then push them into crowded communal spaces where they faced an elevated risk of contracting COVID-19.

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#COVID-19: Comparing provinces with other countries 22 July Update

2020/07/30 Leave a comment

USA has moved ahead of France in terms of deaths per million. India has moved ahead of Pakistan. No major change in order of Canadian provinces.

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