Thank you.
A lot of the supplementary estimates money is going to the COVID response. So far in northwestern Ontario, there hasn't been a substantial number of cases in the indigenous community, but I think it's pretty inevitable that this is going to change, since we seem to be in the process of an outbreak at the moment. I think we've had something like 100 cases in the last week, whereas we were getting one or two cases per week up until then.
Certainly there's a concern that it's going to spread to first nations communities, many of them in Mr. Melillo's riding, like the Nishnawbe Aski Nation communities, the NAN communities, but Thunder Bay is the conduit. People fly from Thunder Bay to those communities. A lot of the medical services are in Thunder Bay. If for whatever reason people come down to Thunder Bay, get it and go back to those communities, there's certainly a concern.
You're probably not going to be able to answer my first question because it's a medical question, but I found your numbers interesting. I think you said that so far in first nations communities, there have been 28 deaths and over 1,700 cases. This is somewhat reassuring, because there was a concern that in the indigenous communities the death rate would be above the national average, especially based on the fact that H1N1, an influenza, seemed to hit those communities particularly hard, with higher rates of mortality.
From the experience so far, is the mortality rate higher in the indigenous community than in the non-indigenous community? That was the first question.
If there is an answer to that, my second question is, what have we done to try to protect those communities? They have largely, shut down, but the risk has certainly gone up as of the last couple of weeks.