The chair of Toronto’s Board of Health is calling on the province to conduct “proactive testing” for COVID-19 in the city’s northwest corner, an area where he says infection rates have been up to 10 times higher than other parts of the city.

Coun. Joe Cressy wrote an open letter to Health Minister Christine Elliott and Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. David Williams on Thursday in which he pressed them “to act swiftly” to protect residents in poorer communities that he said are being “disproportionately impacted” by the virus.

Cressy said that the city’s own data has consistently shown that the highest case rates are being found in neighbourhoods “where more people experience structural barriers, including racism and discrimination, and have lower household incomes.”

He said that the province can help by conducting proactive testing in “high-incidence neighbourhoods, including northwest Toronto.”

He said that they should also conduct targeted testing of “demographic groups suspected of being at higher risk due to the social determinants of health, including occupation.”

“The tale of this pandemic is playing out very differently depending on here you live and what we have found is that people on low incomes and people who are working in those frontline manufacturing jobs they are the ones most at risk,” Cressy told CP24 on Thursday afternoon. “If we are going to beat this pandemic, if we are going to reopen our economy the data tells us we need more preventative measures to protect the most vulnerable.”

Some neighbourhoods in northwest Toronto have had more than 400 cases of COVID-19 each since the pandemic began while other wealthier neighbourhoods such as The Beaches (16 cases) and Rosedale-Moore Park (26 cases) have seen much lower rates of infection.

In his letter, Cressy said that “disease preys on poverty” and that the social determinants of health, like income, race and ethnicity, and housing, affect who gets sick and who does not.”

For that reason, he said that the province can’t just settle for testing tens of thousands of people a day. He said that they have to concentrate their testing efforts in the most at-risk neighbourhoods.

“What this pandemic has exposed is that certain communities are more affected and if we are all in this together we need to protect them. Until we protect them our whole city will continue to be at risk,” he told CP24.

In addition to committing to proactive testing in poorer neighbourhoods, Cressy said that the government should also help fund and create “voluntary accommodation options for people who have COVID-19 but cannot safely self-isolate at home.”

Speaking during a briefing at Queen’s Park on Thursday afternoon, Health Minister Christine Elliott said that her government is “happy to look at the situation in northwestern Toronto” and could place mobile testing units there, as it has done with other hard-hit areas.

“If they need help, if they need excess testing then of course we will help out,” she said.