‘Systemic racism’ equals higher rates of COVID-19 among minorities
OTTAWA — Exposure to COVID-19 is a non-negotiable fact of life for many immigrant and visible minority residents in Ottawa.
Take a look at the pandemic-era essential workforce: those supporting the food supply chain, providing taxi or ride-share services, or caring for residents in long-term care homes.
Every day, Abiola Tijani goes into work knowing that his next COVID-19 test — he’s already taken three — could come back positive.
“I’m underemployed, but that’s the only way for me not to rely on the system … to earn my living.”
An immigrant from Nigeria with a university degree in industrial and labour relations, Tijani works as a personal-support worker at the Grace Manor long-term care home in Hintonburg, Ont.
Even before the pandemic, many of his colleagues were non-white, often newcomers. Job opportunities are restricted when you have an accent or degree from a non-western university, Tijani explained.
“You want to work and feed your family … that’s the easiest job to get now. That’s why we are finding more immigrants working (in long-term care).”
According to experts, it’s also part of the reason why COVID-19 appears to pose a disproportionate threat to immigrants and visible minorities, as preliminary data from Ottawa Public Health recently confirmed.
With the virus ripping through congregate care homes, agri-food workplaces and other sites of precarious and low-paying work disproportionately held by newcomers and people of colour, it was inevitable infection rates would be higher among these groups.
In May, Public Health Ontario reported that the rate of COVID-19 infection in the province’s most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods was three times higher than it was in the least-diverse neighbourhoods. Hospitalization and ICU admission rates were four times higher, and death rates were twice as high.
In Ottawa, Medical Officer of Health Dr. Vera Etches recently said 66 per cent of local COVID-19 patients identified as being from a racialized community; 54 per cent were immigrants, or more than double the percentage of Ottawans identified as immigrants or racialized in the 2016 census.
“What we’re seeing is a health inequity,” said Suzanne Obiorah, director of primary care and regional programs at the Somerset West Community Health Centre in Ontario.
“Health inequities are deeprooted, and they’re a direct consequence of systemic barriers, of systemic racism.”
After months of pressure from advocates and public health experts, the Ontario government announced it was proposing to mandate the collection of data about race, income, language and household size from those who tested positive for COVID-19 across the province.
“The beauty of having … this type of data is that it forces you to really face the issues,” Obiorah said. “We have not been very good at capturing this data, and that’s led us, a little bit, to a reactive situation.”
Meanwhile, the particular vulnerability of immigrants and people of colour to COVID-19 has already become a matter of life or death.
Labour union CUPE Ontario has lost six of its members to COVID-19. The majority of them were racialized people working jobs with little pay and security, president Fred Hahn said.
It’s a long-standing reality in Canada that immigrants and people of colour are often under-employed. That’s according to Hindia Mohamoud, director of the Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership. There’s discrimination in the hiring process, lack of employer capacity to assess foreign qualifications, policy gaps … the list goes on, she said. The result for many? Precarious work and income insecurity.
There’s no simple answer when it comes to resolving the disproportionate vulnerability of newcomers and racialized people to COVID19.
However, a good place to start, Obiorah suggested, is understanding and engaging with communities about their health needs.