Harry Shannon
Data just released show that “Black people and other people of colour make up 83 per cent of reported COVID-19 cases while only making up half of Toronto’s population.”
Quick now – how many times more likely are these racialized people to get COVID-19 than the rest of the Toronto population, i.e., white people? 1 ½ times? Twice as likely? Three times?
In fact the correct answer is nearly five times.
That’s not what intuition would tell us, so let’s work it out. If 83% of cases are in people of colour, then 17% are in white people. Likewise if half the population of people of colour, the number of white people must be the same, half the population. There are 83 cases in people of colour for every 17 in white people, so the answer to my question is 83/17, which is nearly five.
In fact, the story did some rounding off – people of colour make up 52% of the population, so white people make up 48%. Given these numbers, the calculation we need is [83/52] divided by [17/48] which works out to 4.5.
The report put out by the city properly noted some limitations in their analysis – for example, they could only include reported cases, they didn’t get relevant data on everybody, and they relied on population data from the census several years ago in 2016. And you could argue about whether factors like age play a role. These will have had some impact, but I doubt they would change the basic message.
The analysis also looked at number of cases by income, and not surprisingly found that people in households with lower incomes were more likely to get the disease. The report suggests several reasons why people of colour and people with low incomes (who may be mostly the same people) are the ones most at risk.
And as I have shown, the risk is even higher than you might think from the way the data were presented in the media.