What does COVID-19 mean for urban Indigenous communities? In terms of transmission rates and risk factors for COVID-19 in these communities, recent funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) will support a key research project seeking to develop new statistical methods to answer this important question. The research team co-led by Professor Michael Rotondi, associate professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Science, Janet Smylie, a Métis physician, professor and research chair at St. Michael’s Hospital and University of Toronto, and Cheryllee Bourgeois, a Cree/Métis midwife at Seventh Generation Midwives Toronto, will receive $395,460 to estimate risk factors and the rate of COVID-19 transmission for Indigenous Peoples in cities.
“Studying ‘hard to reach’ populations like urban Indigenous communities requires highly advanced statistical methods,” said Professor Rotondi. To develop these statistical methods, the team will link the Our Health Counts studies (population-based health research co-led by Indigenous communities) in Toronto, London and Thunder Bay to the provincial COVID-19 database at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (IC/ES) to estimate the transmission rate and risk factors for COVID-19 in these communities.
This research builds on Rotondi’s previous work in advanced statistical methods for urban Indigenous health. Rotondi has been developing and validating new statistical methods to help understand the relationships between health outcomes and their risk factors. In addition to their statistical importance, Rotondi’s work provides some insight into the barriers that are preventing appropriate management of chronic conditions like diabetes, factors that are associated with cardiovascular disease, to help improve the health of urban Indigenous communities. “This is even more important, as very little research is available on the health of Indigenous people who are living in cities, and more than half of all Indigenous people are now living in urban areas,” he added.
This project is one of several led by Faculty of Health researchers who are receiving almost $1 million in funding from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) to conduct rapid research over the next year related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The funding for the Rapid Research Funding projects was announced on June 25, 2020.
