Lives lost while government funding sat idle

Weng James was just 27 years old when he succumbed to COVID-19.

The young Windsor man was described as generous to those around him and a father figure to his younger siblings. He died in a hospital room alone, like so many others who have been taken by this virus — without his family and loved ones nearby.

According to Public Health Ontario data as of Dec. 15, at least 15 Ontarians have died between the ages of 20 and 39. Of those deaths, three or 20 per cent are in the Windsor-essex region: Weng James, and from the first wave of the pandemic, Rogelio Munoz Santos, 24, and Bonifacio Eugenio-romero, 31.

All are men of racialized backgrounds: James was Black of south Sudanese descent, while Santos and Eugenio-romero were both Mexican.

Public Health Ontario data from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic indicated East and South East Asian people were three times more likely to be infected, while South Asians were six times more likely.

Black Ontarians? They were 10 times more likely to be infected. Meanwhile, Indigenous people — just over one per cent of the population at the time — represented 30 per cent of infections.

It should not come as a surprise race is an important factor in tracking and responding to a pandemic.

Toronto Public Health was able to show this at a more granular level for the ongoing pandemic: people who identified at Arab, Middle Eastern, West Asian, Latin American, South East Asian or Black were six to nine times more likely to test positive for COVID-19.

What would we see if we had timely access to similar data in Windsor-essex?

Being armed with this extra information allows those in charge of pandemic planning to make more informed decisions and improve equity in those responses. It can help to decrease the disparity of those who are at risk of and dying from this pandemic.

It can also lead to weaponizing this data against the populations it seeks to help instead of addressing the systemic weaknesses at play. It can further point to information communities already knew and were pointing to for years before with little avail — and then lead to no action once again.

So without evidence-based action plans in conjunction with collecting race-based data, the numbers mean nothing. But that requires robust investments in public services such as public health.

Yet in 2019, the Ford government announced plans to cut public health funding. This move would mean municipalities would eventually pay 30 per cent of the costs. The government also indicated a further plan to consolidate 35 public health units into 10.

This current pandemic has shown our local health unit is already stretched beyond capacity in simply managing local cases.

Adding anything to their immense workload — including deep dives into race-based and socioeconomic data while respecting privacy and data weaponization concerns — without additional investments would be next to impossible, let alone doing so in a situation where further services may be cut due to lack of funding.

So here we are as residents caught in a Catch-22 at the same time reports show the province sat on $12 billion in unspent pandemic funding in September, as the second wave hit, with little transparency regarding its intended use or allocation.

Those funds went unspent while the largest school outbreak in the province happened right here in Windsor.

Those funds went unspent as farms struggled to adequately isolate and support their workers — many of whom are migrant workers.

The $12 billion sat idle as long-term care homes struggled without proper resources, staffing and oversight.

Government spending is often said to indicate its priorities. Perhaps even more powerfully, government “not-spending” may be a stronger indicator what the government deems as important.

For many racialized Ontarians, these priorities come as no surprise.

But when it comes to the lives of men like Weng James, Rogelio Munoz Santos, Bonifacio Eugenio-romero and the 88 other local residents who have died, more can be done.