“When I called some home companies [of non-public protective equipment], they said, “We are not allowed to announce it, but we are exhausted and, if we do, the priority is to go to the hospital.” a warning to me, ” says Cameron. He texted network friends, bosses, and council members to sound the alarm and offer assistance in updating plans for the pandemic.
It wasn’t the first time Cameron had to prepare for a public fitness crisis: she and a handful of local fitness managers developed her community’s first pandemic plan in reaction to the 2002 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome.
At that time and today, many others feared that the virus would devastate communities already suffering from the legacy of colonization: poverty, overcrowding, limited sanitation and limited access to safe water, ideal situations for the spread of the disease. But despite these challenges, Aboriginal communities fared better than the rest of Canada in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As of August 6, the percentage of others living in the First Nations reserves who tested positive for COVID-19 is a quarter of the overall Canadian population. Of a total of 422 cases shown of COVID-19 in reserve, more than 80% have recovered. Six other people died, a mortality rate of one-fifth of the general population. According to Aboriginal Services Canada, “First Nations communities are flattening the curve.”
British Columbia is a smart example: the province reported only 90 cases of COVID-19 among other First Nations people in the first six months of 2020. Health officials attributed these low numbers to “extraordinary” public aptitude measures taken through Aboriginal communities.
According to Dr. Nel Weiman, acting deputy medical director of the First Nations Health Authority, reminiscent of past epidemics in which entire villages almost disappeared has caused others to distrust COVID-19. “Communities have identified a desire to take this seriously and install their own versions of public fitness measures,” Weiman says.
Other indigenous people have been artistic in staying virtually connected, installing caravans to isolate themselves and creating barricades to access their communities. Now that the rest of the province has reopened, many of these communities are struggling to remain closed. “Some other people consider it controversial, but I don’t think other people can say that by restricting access … communities have been able to protect themselves to some extent,” Weiman says.
The First Nations Health Authority also issued special messages on physical fitness for the public, in particular, identifying the strengths of Aboriginal people and the sacrifices made through communities during the closure. Many have suspended or changed ceremonies, funerals and initiation rites.
Robert Bonspiel, Director of First Nations Paramedics, the only Aboriginal personal ambulance service in Quebec, attributes low rates of infection among other Aboriginal people to communities that adopt a proactive pandemic technique.
As co-director of The Emergency Reaction Unit for Kanehsat’s Mohawk Network: ke, Quebec, “we ask others to return to their roots, to return to what they were years later, to worry about their neighbors and their families,” he says.
In addition to establishing barricades as in British Columbia, the network encouraged others to stay at home by delivering food to the elderly, food baskets and recipes. Keeping the elderly at home would possibly have been a protection, given the highest number of deaths in long-term care, Bonspiel adds. “If you look at the general population of Quebec, their elders are placed [in nursing homes]. In the Mohawk network and First Nations communities, we don’t do that.
For the Inuit, the TB EXPERIENCE has COVID-19-ready communities. “Inuit communities unfortunately have professionals to locate contact and isolate tuberculosis,” so pandemic measures “were not a new phenomenon,” says Deborah Van Dyk, senior policy director at Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the nonprofit that represents more than 60,000 Inuit. . Canada.
“Force-based” methods to mobilize communities, reduce poverty, and put into effect Specific Inuit responses to eliminate TUBERCULOSIS can also help coVID-19 reaction, van Dyk says. Inuit communities also worked with their public fitness staff, “so it was much less difficult for such staff to reassign.”
Van Dyk says the immediate arrest of possibly would have helped prevent the spread of COVID-19 among the Inuit, but it is too early to say without an assessment of the public aptitude response. Meanwhile, “there are still many paintings to be made in terms of impact … about intellectual fitness, business, education and that sort of thing,” he says.