New Westminster is urging senior governments to collect more data to help better understand who is most impacted by COVID-19.
On Monday, council approved a motion by Coun. Nadine Nakagawa to write to the provincial and federal ministries of health asking them to collect disaggregated data, including race, socioeconomic class and disability, that will allow for evidence-based health care and social program interventions. The motion also asks that the data be collected with the intention of being understood as indicators of systemic and structural oppression to identify root causes of disparity.
“This is something that many different community organizations and racialized communities have been calling for,” Nakagawa said. “Since the beginning of COVID, it has also been coming out of Ontario as well – many calls for this type of data. We know in the United States, where data is being collected, that racialized communities are more highly affected.”
As an example, Nakagawa said members of the Filipinx community often work in some of the lowest-paid positions in health care, including jobs in seniors’ centres and as cleaners in hospitals.
“If we don’t have that information, then we can’t target interventions appropriately,” she said.
Nakagawa said work has to be done to create interventions that are more than window dressing and to do more than just acknowledge and talk about racism.
“We have to talk about how we can dismantle systems of oppression. That’s really what this is about,” she said of the motion. “That is why it signals community leadership, that the communities most impacted should have access to this information as well, and they should be involved in how it is collected and how it is used. At the end of the day, it shouldn’t just be the government owning this data.”
Nakagawa said this type of data has been used in the past to create more harm against communities, by creating narratives about those communities that are harmful.
Coun. Chinu Das said the data would be a valuable thing to have for decision-making purposes.
“Given the current awareness, heightened awareness of systemic racism, I think this would be a very good motion to support and move along,” she said. “I actually look forward to this data in our decision-making.”
Disaggregated data refers to data that has been divided into detailed sub-categories, and is based on characteristics including family income, gender and racial/ethnic group.
According to the COVID-19 data collection motion, B.C. and Canada do not capture raced-based or socioeconomic data, which effectively buries the impact of illness and disease on disproportionately impacted groups within the larger aggregated data, erasing opportunities to address health inequities. The motion states B.C. has experienced a lower than average illness and casuaity rate, primarily because of evidence-based data.
“I have written a little bit about this and followed the issue. I can tell you that in places like New York, Montreal, all of Britain, tracking this data has led to the revelation that we are not all united by COVID,” said Coun. Jaimie McEvoy. “We are disunited. COVID seems to have impacts with the same kind of socioeconomic and racial impacts that other issues have. But in Canada we haven’t had much of that discussion because, in Canada, we don’t collect the data.”
Council will write to provincial federal health ministers and will forward the letter to all B.C. municipalities and ask them to write their support for COVID-19 data collection.
“Having a discussion about which communities have been impacted and how to respond to those impacts, and doing the research to try and understand it, these are things we need data to do. … If we are going to have equality in the public health-care system, we need to start with information,” McEvoy said.
* Filipinx: A gender-inclusive term used in place of Filipino and Filipina, which are terms stemming from Spanish colonization of the Philippines.
