TORONTO -- Provinces are slowly opening up businesses after seeing positive results from weeks of coronavirus measures, but as cases decline in certain regions, Indigenous communities in remote locations are seeing a new surge.

In Saskatchewan, there’s been a large outbreak in the northern community of La Loche, where more than 160 people have contracted the virus.

The nearby Clearwater Dene First Nations has 21 cases, according to The Canadian Press, and two Indigenous elders who lived at the local seniors’ home in La Loche have died.

Advocates are saying the government should have seen this coming.

“This is very predictable,” Dr. Anna Banerji, an infectious disease specialist and co-chair of the Indigenous Health Conference at the University of Toronto, told CTV News.

“There are many longstanding disparities between Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous communities. There are severe overcrowding in some of these communities, a lack of … water security, a lack of food security in these communities.”

One of the current struggles that Indigenous communities are facing during the pandemic is a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Banerji, along with Indigenous leaders from across Canada, created a petition more than a month ago urging the federal government to take more steps to assist Indigenous communities.

She pointed out to CTV News that within Indigenous communities, there are often disproportionately high rates of chronic disease and other illnesses, such as “diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure … which are all risk factors for COVID.”

In a press briefing this weekend, Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller acknowledged that Indigenous communities “have a higher risk of being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19.”

The government has sent 129 PPE shipments to First Nations communities in Saskatchewan, he said, with 59 shipments sent to northern Saskatchewan communities.

A community-led response has also sprung up, aiming to get supplies to La Loche and other communities like it.

A Saskatoon family physician started a fundraiser on Thursday aiming to raise $15,000 to help send supplies to the northern community and by Sunday, the GoFundMe had already received more than $38,000.

“We’ve also been working with volunteer organizations that are also trying to get PPE rapidly up to the communities,” Banerji said.

She said they were working with organizations making cloth masks as well, and were trying to figure out “the logistics on how to get some of these masks into the communities.”

One organization is Ilisaqsivik, an Inuit charity based in Nunavut which is focused on community wellness.

“People can donate money to them to get the local community members to buy materials and supplies and make masks and distribute the masks in the Arctic,” Banerji said.

Many reserves and Indigenous communities closed their land borders to outsiders early on in the pandemic, hoping to limit exposure. Because of this and the remote location of many northern communities, some regions that had low case numbers during the past few weeks are only seeing a spike now.

“This situation demonstrates that the onset of COVID in some Indigenous communities may have been delayed by remoteness,” Miller said. “We need to remain vigilant.”

The remote location of many communities, particularly fly-in areas, may have contributed to the delay in the virus reaching them, but it also creates issues with getting supplies in, and seriously ill patients out.

Banerji said this was one of the issues she was worried about weeks ago.

“Part of [our petition to the federal government] was asking for more funding, equitable funding across the different Indigenous communities, especially fly-in communities, where there can be major delays in getting people out,” she said.

She added that these remote communities in most cases don’t have access to ventilators.

The current situation is all the more troubling for Indigenous community members who have not forgotten the last time the federal government failed Indigenous communities during a virus outbreak.

When H1N1 struck Indigenous communities in Manitoba more than 10 years ago, Health Canada caused an uproar by responding to the community’s need with a disturbing gift: shipments of body bags.

It’s something that sticks in the mind. Banerji said that “some communities were decimated,” during H1N1 and also during smallpox before that.

Miller said that the government was learning from the mistakes made during those H1N1 outbreaks in Indigenous communities in 2009.

He also acknowledged the need for more data on just how COVID-19 is affecting the Indigenous population in Canada.

Miller pointed out that demographic data regarding Indigenous cases of COVID-19 are only gathered on reserves, even though Indigenous peoples live all over Canada.

“Given that La Loche is a Metis, Dene community of an overwhelming majority, the presumption than is that the entire 179 cases or so [in La Loche and the surrounding area] are Indigenous,” he said. “And that’s a gap in the data, frankly.”

When it comes to tracking how many Indigenous peoples are contracting the virus within cities hard-hit by the pandemic, such as Toronto or Montreal, he said, “that data is just not there.”

Advocates and health experts have been asking for weeks for health officials to be collecting more demographic data in relation to the pandemic, but The Canadian Press reported Wednesday that the Public Health Agency of Canada was still only considering it.

Canada’s Chief public health official, Dr. Theresa Tam, acknowledged Wednesday that there were holes in the data.

Miller is now joining the call, saying in the press briefing that demographic data needs to be recorded for cases of COVID-19 among Indigenous peoples living outside of reserves. He said that in order for this to happen, provincial governments and health agencies would need to step up.

“We need to be able to put forward tailored measures to prevent further outbreaks, as well as to expand and improve effective interventions if they occur,” he said.

In a step forward, he announced that the government is putting $250,000 towards an initiative to “implement a COVID-19 tracking and response platform for First Nations, Inuit, and Metis.

“This project will include the development of a COVID-19 consortium comprised of federal, provincial, territorial First Nations, Inuit and Metis partners, and their data analysis will help inform the response to COVID-19 by Indigenous communities with the support of the federal government,” he said.

Banerji is hoping that the plight of Indigenous communities will wake up those in power.

“Much more needs to be done, and I think we need to listen to the Indigenous leaders as far as their communities and what the communities need,” she said.

“We really need long-standing changes in … the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the government of Canada and the Canadian population.”

Until there are equitable policies regarding housing, food security, healthcare and education, she said, these communities may remain vulnerable to disasters.