Communities with low incomes, immigrants, essential workers hardest hit by COVID-19: study

In the 1990s, after enduring the uncertainty of seasonal work, Kanaiya Gandhi was offered a job at a Toronto-area factory.

It was an ideal move for the young married man who had immigrated to Canada from India just a decade before: regular hours, stable work and the security of a union. As the years passed, Gandhi became an experienced machine operator, building acoustic panels for various airports and arenas while providing for his wife and two daughters in Brampton, Ont.

But one of his daughters, Radhika, said the factory was also the place where her father caught COVID-19.

After he fell ill in December 2020, Radhika kept in touch with Gandhi's manager at the factory, who told her more and more workers were getting sick — all while her dad's own situation was deteriorating at home, prompting her to call 911 in early January 2021, after he began struggling to breathe.

About a month later, Gandhi passed away in hospital at the age of 58. He'd spent 26 years of his life working on the factory line.

Looking back on her family's loss, Radhika said being an essential worker put her father at a higher risk of contracting the virus, along with so many other Canadians from largely racialized, lower-income neighborhoods.

"Anyone could tell you that people of colour and marginalized communities face a lot of health inequities," she said.

There's now new data backing that up, thanks to findings from a Canadian research team that suggest COVID-19 disproportionately impacted certain communities throughout much of the pandemic.

Published on Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), the new peer-reviewed study analyzed COVID-19 cases in various regions between January 2020 and the end of February 2021 to understand which areas were hardest hit.

The team linked COVID-19 surveillance data with demographic breakdowns from 16 Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs) — which can include major cities and surrounding regions — in British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec, the four provinces that accounted for the bulk of Canada's cases in the pandemic's first year. (Long-term care cases were excluded, to instead focus on transmission in the community.)

The researchers found that cases were "disproportionately concentrated" in areas with lower incomes and education levels, along with a higher proportion of visible minorities, recent immigrants, high-density housing and essential workers.

"We kind of expected from what we saw on the ground and from reports from local public health units that we would see this pattern," said lead author Mathieu Maheu-Giroux, an assistant professor in McGill University's department of epidemiology, biostatistics and occupational health in Montreal.

"But it was quite striking to see this consistency."

In the Toronto CMA, for instance — which includes surrounding areas such as Brampton, where the Gandhi family lived — 50 per cent of the reported COVID-19 cases during the study period were clustered in areas with roughly 30 per cent of the population.