All over the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected patients based on a variety of identifiable factors, from age to sex to occupation. Data such as these are crucial to public-health officials and researchers tasked with improving care for all citizens. But in some cases, the quest for data seems driven as much by political factors as by the need to protect public health. In Canada, where I work as a resident physician in the field of head and neck surgery, the federal government has proposed that racial data be tracked as part of our national response to the COVID-19 pandemic, as is already the case in the United States. On the surface, there would seem to be an obvious parallel with the need to collect race-based policing data, especially in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the worldwide protests that followed. Collecting such data makes sense in the context of policing, since race corresponds to a visible marker that can prompt radically different responses from police officers. But the situation is different when …