City turns to province for help in fighting COVID-19 in hard-hit northwest corner

Thestar.com
July 9, 2020
Rachel Mendleson

The chair of Toronto’s Board of Health is urging the province to take swift action to fight COVID-19 in the city’s northwest corner, which has been hardest hit by the virus, and bridge the stark socioeconomic divide that is putting residents in these neighbourhoods at risk.

“The social determinants of health, like income, race and ethnicity, and housing, affect who gets sick and who does not,” Councillor Joe Cressy said in a letter on Wednesday to Ontario’s health minister and chief medical officer of health.

“Now is the time for partnership and collaboration,” Cressy said. “I am asking you to help us stop the spread of COVID-19 in vulnerable and impacted communities, and to address the social determinants of health that have created deep health inequities.”

Cressy is calling on the province to take steps to “protect residents” in northwest Toronto neighbourhoods overburdened by COVID-19, including: providing increased access to testing; funding a proposal to create free accommodations for those unable to safely self-isolate at home; ensuring better protections for at-risk workers; and implementing a “more efficient and fully automated” system for reporting lab results to public health units.

The health ministry did not make Dr. David Williams, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, or Health Minister Christine Elliott available for an interview on Wednesday.

In a statement, a ministry spokesperson described several programs the government has developed “to protect our province’s most vulnerable,” including the ability to “rapidly deploy agile testing resources,” but did not specifically address the high rates of COVID in Toronto’s northwest corner or respond to questions about whether mobile testing units would be deployed there.

Cressy is also asking the province, which is responsible for testing, to share COVID-19 data it is poised to start collecting on race, income, language and household size with local public health units and affected communities -- something the ministry told the Star it is “considering.”

“We are in the process of working with public health and privacy experts to determine how best to collect this data across all public health units,” the spokesperson added.

Toronto Public Health has been gathering data on race, income and household composition as part of its contact tracing protocol since May.

Joe Cressy, chair of Toronto’s Board of Health, has sent a letter to the province urging swift action to fight COVID-19 in the city’s northwest corner, which has been hardest hit by the virus.

Cressy’s letter comes after data from Toronto Public Health made clear that the city’s northwest corner is bearing the brunt of the pandemic, with the release of a map showing COVID-19 cases by neighbourhood. The burden of disease is heaviest in Mount Olive-Silverstone-Jamestown, where, according to the latest numbers, the rate of sporadic infections is 1,241 per 100,000 people -- 22 times higher than in The Beaches, the city’s least-affected neighbourhood.

As the Star reported last month, these northwest neighbourhoods have some of the highest concentrations of residents who are low-income, racialized and living in cramped housing while working in higher-risk sectors like manufacturing. Residents and community workers told the Star that high rates of COVID were yet another example of how the “system has failed” the northwest corner, which spans a large swath of Toronto, wedged roughly between Dufferin Street and Highway 427 to the west, running south from Steeles Avenue to Eglinton Avenue.

The notion that the way residents in these neighbourhoods live and work is putting them more at risk during the pandemic was further emphasized by Toronto Public Health data released last week.

Kemi Jacobs, executive director of Delta Family Resource Centre, which has three locations in northwest neighbourhoods, said on Wednesday that the request for increased support from the province is “very timely.”

“For me, the key word is proactive. Now that we know, let’s not just sit back, let’s do something to prevent as opposed to react,” she said.

Leticia Deawuo, who lives at Jane and Sheppard, and is executive director of the Black Creek Community Farm, said government must do more to stop the spread of COVID in the northwest corner. However, she said “we cannot lose sight” of the systemic changes that are needed to address anti-Black racism, improve working conditions and lift wages.

“We know that there are these deep inequities that exist,” she said. “So, what are they going to do in the long-term to make sure our communities can be healthy?”

In an interview, Cressy said he is “deeply concerned that we are entering a prolonged period in the arc of COVID where it’s going to continue to disproportionately affect -- and indeed harm -- the most vulnerable members of our society, and our city,” and that protecting these residents requires “a comprehensive intergovernmental response.”

“We don’t oversee the testing system. We don’t oversee the lab reporting system,” he said. “This work was required yesterday, we’d like to see it done today, and we’re raising it in this letter in the hopes that we will see movement on these issues as soon as possible.”

A lack of access to testing is of particular concern in the city’s northwest corner, Cressy said, where, despite the neighbourhood-level data released by Toronto Public Health more than a month ago showing high rates of COVID, “we have struggled to see a proactive and responsive provincial testing plan.”

This corner has historically been considered a “primary care desert,” with higher-than-average rates of chronic conditions, such as diabetes, as the Star has reported. Although testing rates had been high overall, the Star found there were barriers to accessing assessment centres because travelling by TTC while symptomatic is discouraged, and not everyone owns a car.

Toronto city council will debate the proposal from the board of health for the city to work with other levels of government to create voluntary, free accommodations for those who test positive for COVID-19 and can’t safely self-isolate at home. In his letter on Wednesday, Cressy said the data shows that infection rates in Toronto “are almost four times higher in neighbourhoods where more people live in overcrowded households.”

Cressy told the Star he is in “active conversations” with the federal government about this proposal and is “optimistic that funding is coming” from Ottawa. But he said the provincial government has not yet indicated a willingness to support the plan.

The ministry did not respond to questions about the proposal on Wednesday.