How Calgary’s Upper Northeast hit Canada’s best COVID-19 vaccination rates
It’s a success story for a region that struggled through the worst infection rates in Alberta during the province’s second wave
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When Alberta first began rolling out COVID-19 vaccines, Charles Odame-Ankrah quickly realized that information campaigns about the safety and effectiveness of the shots did not reach a significant portion of the Calgarians.
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“It left out mainly Africans,” said Odame-Ankrah, president of the Ghanaian Canadian Association in Calgary. “It was not a lack of information. The information was there, but people were not reached by it.”
This concern was shared by other African-Canadian community leaders, triggering the formation of the Calgary African Community Collective, a grassroots group that aimed to break down barriers to the approximately 60,000 Calgarians of African descent during the pandemic.
In the coming months, hundreds of community organizations in Calgary began coordinating campaigns on the ground to increase vaccinations in Calgary’s northeastern community, focusing on outreach work to provide the region’s immigrants and visible minorities with the information they needed to feel comfortable. rolls up his sleeves.
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The results: a striking coverage rate of 99.2 percent for first doses of COVID-19 vaccines in Calgary’s Upper Northeast for those aged 12 years and up, the highest uptake anywhere in Alberta. The second dose of admission for the same age group, which has been eligible for shots since May, is 93.9 per cent.
This first dose is tied to the highest in Canada, placing it among exclusive companies. A post-media data analysis showed that a 99 percent uptake has only been achieved in two other Canadian regions: Leeds, Grenville and Lanark District in Ontario and Terres-Cries-de-la-Baie-James in Quebec. (Regional geographical breakdowns are not available for three provinces and territories. British Columbia also states that the Kitimat Health Region has a 100 percent initial dose intake for the age group over 12, but notes that this figure is likely to overrepresent vaccine coverage due to population changes.)
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It is a highly praised success story for a region that struggled through the worst infection rates in Alberta during the province’s second wave, with its high concentration of essential workers and multi-generational households making it vulnerable to virus spread.
A wide range of strategies were used to reach out to community members, including door-to-door and outreach calls, and microclinics – small pop-up vaccination sites designed to remove barriers to vaccine access. Cultural groups also focused on delivering messages in languages spoken at home and using images of colored people.
Régine King, professor of social work at the University of Calgary and advisor to the local African collective, said a guiding principle was to ensure that vaccine encouragement came from trusted community voices. She said many black people distrust the medical institution because of historical abuse.
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“Those issues come into play when you talk about people who are mostly immigrants,” King said. “The issue of trust that has been mentioned, I think, is historically based on how people view medical interventions.”
The idea of trust was also central to Dr. Mukarram Zaidi, a family doctor who became involved in vaccination advocacy in northeastern Calgary after a local imam contacted him for help promoting immunizations among the city’s Muslim population. He continued to work with mosques to support culturally and spiritually conscious messages about public health.
“When people ask me, ‘Have you been vaccinated?’, I tell them that my mother has been vaccinated, and my wife and my children and myself. When we were eligible, we were vaccinated and I would not advise them to do something that I do not do, ”said Zaidi.
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Vaccination successes in northeastern Calgary span all age groups, including those aged 20-39, the group that has had the lowest vaccine intake in Alberta. In the Upper Northeast, 97 percent of people in the age group have at least one shot, compared to an average of 87 percent in Calgary.
Zaidi credits the high water mark to the work of youth organizers. Among them is Sana Jawad, a medical student who co-founded the Calgary branch of the Muslim Medical Association of Canada and worked to encourage those in her age group to get the plug. She took action after seeing misinformation about vaccines circulating among her peers on social media.
“It really felt like a natural step to address, and I know that religion and culture are a big part of many people’s lives, especially for immigrants and minority groups, so we decided to host an information event that would offer on both spiritual and medical experts, ”said Jawad, successfully from the first event, which encouraged the organizers to host one in Arabic.
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“Overall, the reasons why people are not vaccinated are very multifaceted, so I think the approach should also be multifaceted. Our efforts were just a piece of the puzzle. “
Seeing high vaccination rates for young people is a source of joy for Jawad, who she says “shows us how far we have come.”
Zaidi said vaccine success in the Northeast was gratifying in the wake of much-maligned comments from Prime Minister Jason Kenney on RED FM radio station in the second wave of the pandemic as he issued a “wake-up call” to Northeastern residents, especially the southern states. Asian societies as transmission rates skyrocketed.
In all, more than 250 organizations were involved in vaccine-seeking initiatives in the northeastern part of Calgary, according to the Center for Newcomers, where the governments of Alberta and Calgary offer financial and logistical assistance to some groups carrying out this work. This government support included $ 170,000 in emergency aid for COVID-19 for the Calgary African Community Collective.
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Leading the province’s efforts was Rajan Sawhney, the UCP MLA for Calgary-North East and Alberta’s former Minister of Community and Social Services. She said she heard from community leaders in the area when the government first rolled out vaccine announcements to say the approach would not work for some different Calgary communities.
“I knew there was a need in these communities for COVID support,” said Sawhney, now Alberta’s transport minister. “The ethnocultural community did quiet work behind the scenes to combat misinformation about vaccines.”
This work included vaccine outreach work and clinics, but other initiatives, such as food deliveries to quarantined families, were part of the structure of society’s pandemic response.
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Sawhney said the experience provides lessons on how to engage a grassroots coalition to tackle broad, societal issues.
“There are so many different demographic groups living in these very ethnically diverse communities, and you need a customized response. It can not be a cookie-cutter response,” she said. “Let people who know how one does the work, and those who are closest to the community, do it because they have done the work before. “
Community groups like the Calgary African Community Collective need more funding to continue to make a difference, Odame-Ankrah said. He said most of the group members are volunteers and limited funding means they do not have a building to call their home.
A uniform approach does not work for problems across the province, Odame-Ankrah added, highlighting the need to dig down and find solutions from within the communities.
“What Nigerians need is very different from what Somalis need. And what the Cameroonians need is very different from what the Ghanaians need, ”he said. “You can not believe we are all Africans and you can not put us all in a box.”
jherring@postmedia.com
Twitter: @jasonfherring
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