MONTREAL – Community teams in Montreal say they did not yet have a selection to take it on their own after the Quebec government again pledged to collect race-based knowledge to help hint at the effect of COVID-19 on marginalized communities.
Thierry Lindor, a Montreal businessman, presented a platform this week to collect data from blacks, aboriginal people and others of color across Canada on how the new coronavirus has affected them and their families.
Eighty-nine others responded to the anonymous online survey in the first 24 hours since the launch of The Colors of COVID, Lindor said in an interview Thursday, adding that 80-90% of respondents were in Quebec.
“How do you fight something that can’t be measured?It all comes down to that,” said Lindor, who has partnered with a handful of advocacy groups, adding the Federation of Black Canadians to the project.
“The purpose of The Colors of COVID is to make sure we paint a transparent image of other people who have been invisible for too long.”
For months, network organizations across Canada have been asking for race-based knowledge similar to COVID-19 amid considerations that black, Aboriginal and colored communities are disproportionately affected by the virus.
The data, advocates say, would help highlight the underlying socio-economic disorders that they say would contribute to maximum rates of infection and cause governments to take concrete action.
However, while Ontario has promised to collect pandemic-related race-based knowledge, Quebec Public Fitness Director Dr. Horacio Arruda recently retracted a promise he made in early May to do the same.
Arruda told reporters on August 3 that racial knowledge gathering is “sensitive” and that Quebec would seek other tactics to map threat points of infection in fast communities, such as geography.
A spokeswoman for the provincial fitness department, Marie-Claude Lacasse, said Thursday that the province understands the importance of race-based COVID-19 data, but “we are currently gathering the information.”
She said in an email that the public fitness firm was reviewing existing literature on how race can affect COVID-19 infection rates.thing for COVID-19.
But that doesn’t happen enough for many organizers, who say that other people of color were abandoned when COVID-19 hit their communities, and that Quebec wants to go beyond simply reading the subject.
“Thinking they would have the audacity, the brazenness, to go take an exam, to know what?Six months from now, saying, ‘Yes, it turns out we’ve collected race-based data,'” Lindor said..
“It’s just alarming to me. It’s alarming, it’s awful, and this isn’t the Quebec I hope my kids grow up in.”
Tiffany Callender is the Executive Director of the Côte-des-Neiges Black Community Association, which campaigns on behalf of black families.
One of the maximum areas affected by COVID-19 in Montreal, the epicenter of the pandemic in Quebec in total, the province has reported more than 61,400 cases and 5,730 virus-related deaths to date.
Callender said that many citizens of Cote-des-Neiges lost their jobs because of the pandemic, while others were frontline personnel who were threatened by their physical condition and that of their circle of relatives, but had to continue working.
“At one point, Cote-des-Neiges had the highest number of cases in Montreal and the reaction of the Quebec government was so delayed…It was like being abandoned,” she said in an interview.
Gaining insights to illustrate the challenge will describe the wishes of the network and government teams to allocate more resources, Callender said.
The survey asks participants to provide their ethnicity, age, gender and neighborhood, among other non-public details.
He then asked participants if they had been tested for COVID-19, whether they had a circle of relatives who tested positive or died from the virus, and how the pandemic had an effect on their lives.
Callender added that the link between race and poverty, and the fact of contracting COVID-19, is clear.
“If you’re going to be too moved by COVID-19, the likelihood of you living in poverty is high,” he said.”Then the question is, who lives in poverty?And when you answer that question, look for other people.”
“I very much doubt that the government does not know; will act if he admits it.”
Lindor said he was in talks with the federal government to verify safe investment and others for COVID’s Colors, and said he hoped to gather between 1,500 and 2,000 surveys completed over the next 60 days.
While most respondents answered questions online, they said network computers and volunteers will use tablets for percentage of the survey with vulnerable network members on the user in the coming weeks.
For example, Lindor said, “while picking up your food baskets at least once a week, you can have a voice.”
This Canadian Press report was first published on August 20, 2020.