Heather Scoffield: COVID-19 statistics don’t reflect the reality for Indigenous people living in Canadian cities

By now, we know quite a few things about the relationship between COVID-19 and vulnerable people in our midst.

We know it spreads insidiously in crowded homes, in low-income neighbourhoods and among people with underlying conditions. Poverty, precarious housing, multi-generational households and poor health are the breeding grounds for the virus.

So the quiet back-patting that’s been going on among government officials for the slow spread of COVID-19 to Indigenous communities is jarring to Dr. Janet Smylie.

The — that the percentage of COVID-19 cases on reserves is half the rate of that in the general population, and that the fatality rate is one-fifth of that in the general population — do not reflect her reality.

She is on the front lines of Indigenous health care in Toronto, watching and confronting the spread of COVID-19, and researching contagion and its effects among urban Indigenous populations more generally.

Smylie is a researcher at St. Michael’s Hospital, and research chair in Indigenous health knowledge and information. And she is convinced that the virus is drastically under-reported among Indigenous people living in cities.

According to , well over half of Indigenous people live in Canada’s cities. They are not included in the federal government’s efforts to monitor the spread of coronavirus nor are they included in new initiatives to collect statistics on a disaggregated basis to take into account minorities. And while many of them are healthy and prosperous, as a demographic, they check off every single box for being at high risk of catching and suffering deeply from COVID-19.

From what Smylie can see, they are indeed catching the virus, and spreading it to their tight-knit networks, both in the cities and on reserves, at an alarming pace.

“The reports that we’re hearing underestimate the impacts,” Smylie said in a recent interview. “There is an undercount.”

But there’s no way of knowing that for sure. Indigenous Services Canada and Statistics Canada are both looking at ways to measure COVID-19 contagion off reserves, and the Public Health Agency of Canada did not respond to multiple requests for information.

Instead, the federal authorities point to the provinces, who are responsible for delivering health care to Indigenous people off reserve. And not all provinces separate out that information in a transparent way, experts say. It’s “fragmented,” as Smylie says, and the result of decades of entrenched jurisdictional conflict and passing the buck.

“It’s like ignoring a blazing fire.”

In Manitoba, however, we do have some numbers — and they’re devastating. The virus is far more prevalent among First Nations there than among the province’s population in general, and it’s even worse among off-reserve First Nations people. Hospitalization and intensive-care rates are sky-high for off-reserve populations, and testing is low. Both on and off reserves, .

In other words, COVID-19 is spreading faster among off-reserve Indigenous people in Manitoba — and hitting them harder.

“It’s staggering, and it’s going to start impacting that older group,” says Grand Chief Arlen Dumas.

If those trends hold in other provinces, it’s important to know now — and not just after the fact through studies and research projects. Not just out of respect for basic human rights to health care but also because resources could then be allocated to a fragile segment of the population in a way that is both effective and meaningful.

Jocelyn Formsma is at the forefront of those delivering help to Indigenous people living in cities. As the head of the National Association of Friendship Centres, a network serving about 1.4 million people in towns big and small, Formsma is alarmed — not just about COVID-19 spreading through those communities, but also the toll it’s taking on vulnerable people living in isolation.

As communal kitchens have shut down, some friendship centres have staff cooking and putting together food hampers at home, adding sweetgrass and cedar, and hand-delivering them to people in need. Other centres have set up computer terminals at windows so that people without fixed addresses can come apply for government benefits without coming inside. Staff at the centres are constantly scrambling for extra space, resources and personal protective equipment to handle the safety demands of the virus.

“They’re just exhausted,” Formsma says.

In Manitoba, the grand chief and the province’s leading Indigenous health experts have taken to having weekly direct conversations with anyone at all over Facebook, fielding questions on everything from how to find a shelter space that safe from COVID-19 on short notice to whether there are microchips hidden in upcoming vaccines (No, for the record).

“There is a true desire to keep everyone safe,” says Dumas.

There’s no doubt that desire exists across all levels of government. Imagine what we could do if goodwill could be accompanied by good data.

Heather Scoffield is the Star’s Ottawa bureau chief and an economics columnist. Follow her on Twitter: