A Statistics Canada study found that certain racial populations in Canada have significantly higher death rates from COVID-19.
The analysis says the death rate from COVID-19 was much higher for racialized people compared to non-racialized people. It found 31 deaths per 100,000 for the racialized population and 22 deaths per 100,000 for the nonracialized population.
“This confirms what many of us believed, that COVID primarily targets people of color,” said Dr. Anna Banerjee, an infectious disease specialist and professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.
Black people have the highest death rate, more than twice that of non-racial residents. This was followed by those who identify as South Asian and Chinese.
However, those who were Chinese had similar mortality rates to non-racial people.
The study estimated the death rates from COVID-19 in Canada in 2020 and compared them with recently released data from the 2016 census. Only South Asian, Chinese and black people were analyzed due to sample size limitations, the study said.
Nicole Aitken, an analyst at Statistics Canada in Ottawa, said the findings were limited because the researchers did not have data on people living in nursing homes or other institutional living settings. Early in the pandemic, there were deadly outbreaks in nursing homes across the country.
The study also did not include the effect of the COVID-19 vaccines, which have been widely distributed since 2021.
The study found that among the Canadian population, men had higher death rates, but black men had the highest rate, with 62 deaths per 100,000 people. Black women also had a much higher death rate than their non-racial counterparts.
Chinese women have the lowest death rate at 16 deaths per 100,000 people.
The study also examined the effects of low income on racial mortality after accounting for other risk factors such as age, gender, and housing type.
The study found that a person’s socioeconomic situation played a role in COVID-19 deaths for all populations except the Chinese.
“The rate for blacks who live in low income is almost three times higher than blacks who don’t live in low income,” Aitken said.
“So this group … seems to be in a much more vulnerable situation than some of the other populations in Canada.”
People with low incomes, overcrowded housing and apartments had higher chances of dying from COVID-19.
Banerjee said it is clear that many racialized people are at increased risk due to poverty and underlying disease. She added that many of them were also in front-line, low-paying jobs where they couldn’t stay home or take sick days.
“This kind of data helps us with public health policy that recognizes the disparity and tries to address it,” she said.
David Fisman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Toronto, said it’s important to take race and ethnicity seriously as factors in people’s health. He said the data was not available in Canada until recently.
“There’s this interaction between black race-ethnicity in Canada and low income that’s just deadly for people,” Fisman said.
“When you have a black racial ethnicity and you’re also impoverished, that seems to carry an extremely high risk.”
The study says its findings are consistent with others conducted in the United States and elsewhere that have found worse outcomes among racialized populations.
A study commissioned by the Black Coalition Against COVID in the US found that rates of infection, hospitalization and death were highest among black Americans. This study says this is a result of structural and societal realities, including frontline work, living in multigenerational homes and in more populated areas. Health care inequities, including higher rates of diabetes and chronic kidney disease, as well as racism and bias in the health care system also play a role, the study said.
The Statistics Canada study says the link between low income, racial populations and COVID-19 mortality can be explained by “multiple pathways.” Low income, inadequate housing, and less access to preventive health care can increase risk.
Fisman said the results may not be surprising to people who have seen the virus spread widely in low-income neighborhoods or workplaces that are poorly ventilated.
He said it shows how clean indoor air is an important health equity issue.
“It’s getting easier and easier to see what the mechanisms are that drive these differences,” he said. “A lot of it just comes down to where people live and work and spend their time indoors.”
The study did not analyze the effect of COVID-19 on Indigenous people due to data limitations.
Race-based COVID-19 data released in Manitoba last year showed Indigenous people accounted for 17 percent of COVID-19 infections, despite making up 13 percent of the province’s population. The province’s First Nations COVID-19 Task Force found much higher rates of severe outcomes and death among this population during the pandemic.
Kelly Geraldine Malone, The Canadian Press
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
COVID-19
Add Comment