Nunavut’s housing crisis and COVID-19 could be a bad combination – Nunatsiaq News
12 March 2020
“All it takes is one child to go out to school or wherever and come back and then the whole household could be sick”
Nunavut would face some special challenges if COVID-19 spreads through the territory.
Among them would be the difficulty of isolating infected residents in a territory where many live in overcrowded housing, said Dr. Anna Banerji, the director of global and Indigenous health, faculty of medicine, at the University of Toronto.
“If you have a whole bunch of kids in the household, how do you wash your hands … to prevent yourself from being sick?” asked Banerji.
“All it takes is one child to go out to school or wherever and come back and then the whole household could be sick.”
COVID-19, the coronavirus that originated in China in December, was declared to be a pandemic by the World Health Organization on Wednesday, March 11.
