Race-based and other demographic information on COVID-19 patients is not being collected consistently across provinces in Canada. Therefore, whether the burden of COVID-19 is falling disproportionately on the shoulders of particular demographic groups is relatively unknown. In this article, we first provide an overview of the available geographic and demographic data related to COVID-19. We then make creative use of these existing data to fill the vacuum and identify key demographic risk factors for COVID-19 across Canada's health regions. Drawing on COVID-19 counts and tabular census data, we examine the association between communities' demographic composition and the number of COVID-19 infections. COVID-19 infections are higher in communities with larger shares of Black and low-income residents. Our approach offers a way for researchers and policymakers to use existing data to identify communities nationwide that are vulnerable to the pandemic in the absence of more detailed demographic and more granular geographic data.
RÉSUMÉ
Les renseignements fondés sur la race et d'autres données démographiques sur les patients atteints duThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
The Canadian government has no plans to release data on the race or socioeconomic status of COVID-19 patients. Therefore, whether COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting certain sociodemographic groups in Canada is unknown. We fill this data void by merging publicly available COVID-19 data with tabular census data to identify risk factors rendering certain geographic areas more vulnerable to COVID-19 infections and deaths. We combine insights obtained from this analysis with information on the socio-demographic profiles of smaller geographic units to predict and display the incidence of COVID-19 infections and deaths in these locales. Like in the U.S., COVID-19 has disproportionately affected black and immigrant communities in Canada. COVID-19 death tolls are also higher in Canadian communities with higher shares of older adults.
Does ‘‘choosing a home’’ still matter for ‘‘choosing a school,’’ despite implementation of school choice policies designed to weaken this link? Prior research shows how the presence of such policies does little to solve the problems of stratification and segregation associated with residentially based enrollment systems, since families differ along racial/ethnic and socioeconomic lines in their access to, and how they participate in, the school choice process. We examine how families’ nearby school supply shapes and constrains their choices. Drawing on a unique dataset consisting of parents’ ranked preferences from among one urban district’s full menu of public schools, we find that Hispanic, white, and black parents share a strong preference for academic performance, but differences in their choices can be traced to variation in nearby supply. Our findings illustrate how the vastly different sets of schools from which parents can choose reproduce race-based patterns of stratification.
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