If Oakridge were a city, its surging COVID-19 rates in late October would have made national headlines and the neighbourhood could have been placed under lockdown weeks ahead of Toronto.

When I visited the Scarborough community in early November, 14 percent of tests were coming back positive, the highest of any neighbourhood in the city. A short distance north of where Danforth Avenue meets Danforth Road, one of the local schools just had an outbreak, the largest in the TDSB, with five students stricken and under quarantine. Overall, Oakridge was near the top of the list for recent infection rates, alongside the now familiar neighbourhoods of Toronto’s northwest. But unlike the latter, this east-end community of 14,000—nearly half of whom live in poverty—had somehow managed to fly under the radar, to the detriment of those who live there.

At a strip mall that backs onto a public housing complex, a woman, probably in her early 70s, joined me in line just outside the Warden Woods Medical Centre. She had come to get her prescription renewed; I was there to ask the doctors about the developing situation in Oakridge. Her arrival caught my attention: no mask, and barely any distance separating us. I took a slow-motion step forward, trying my best to not appear startled as questions raced through my head: Why the brazen attitude? Does she not know about the COVID surge in the area?

“Would you like a mask?” I asked, settling on a gentler way of phrasing my inner thoughts.

“No, I’m good,” she said in a smoky voice.

She explained that she had lost her mask, and figured that the clinic would supply a new one before letting her inside. Besides, she told me, she preferred not wearing one outdoors because of her asthma. Does it not concern you that the virus is circling the area, I asked, citing how Oakridge ranked number one for this and that. It was all news to her.

“I listen to CFHI,” she told me. “But I haven’t turned the radio on in a couple of days.”

She wasn’t the only one in the dark. Of the dozen people I spoke with—clinic staff, a young couple pushing a stroller, random people on the street—not a single person was aware of the elevated state of danger around them. At the time, Toronto was still in “modified stage 2” and to a degree, that was what people understood. Unfortunately, no one had bothered to tell them that things were a lot worse where they were. I was the one delivering the news.

During the first wave, the virus settled in Toronto’s northwest. But lately, its whereabouts have been more erratic. We’ve seen sporadic surges in places like Woburn, Bendale, Rouge, Scarborough Village, and Oakridge—inner-suburban neighbourhoods far from the limelight where the virus has been able to come and go relatively unannounced, often returning later to wreak more havoc. Bendale, for example, had one of the highest positivity rates in Toronto in late September, and then things got better for a few weeks.

By November, however, rates in the Scarborough neighbourhood had shot all the way up to 19 percent. Even longstanding hotspots in the northwest like Black Creek and Weston have experienced this yo-yo pattern of community transmission recently. In the face of such rapidly changing scenarios, people deserve to know what’s happening around them. Residents of these places would have had many weeks of extremely high risk exposure prior to the province’s decision to lock down Toronto which, according Ontario’s colour-coded framework, is based on average risk across an entire city (i.e. city-wide positivity and incident rates).

At the time of publication, Oakridge’s positivity rate had eased to nine percent (still above the city average of six percent). But there’s no telling when COVID-19 will surge again. Viruses don’t have a brain, but they are clever. They go to where we’re most vulnerable and do their worst damage when ignored. The less attention we pay, the more they spread.