Ottawa: At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, retired teacher Lois Armstrong said local health officials where she lives in Kingston, Ont., provided daily updates about outbreaks, cases and deaths in the community.
Now, Armstrong, 68, said the public is being asked to take a bigger role in managing their risk but information from health authorities is less available than before. Data such as the location of outbreaks, meanwhile, is no longer made public, she added.
“I think it’s very difficult for the average person to assess their own risk,’’ Armstrong said Monday in an interview. “Kingston is one of the hot spots of Ontario, but they still are only posting the information three times a week, and you can’t go get tested unless you’re really high risk or really sick. So there’s no way of knowing.’’
As public health measures have lifted across the country, several indicators of COVID-19 are rising all across Canada, driven by BA.2, a highly contagious sub-lineage of the Omicron variant.
Hospitalizations are also on the rise, chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam said Tuesday.
That makes the risk assessment fairly simple right now, she said.
“All across Canada, doesn’t matter where you are, it’s very likely that Omicron variant, the BA. 2 sub-lineage, is spreading quite widely in your community. So doesn’t matter where you are in Canada right now,’’ Tam said, advising everyone to get vaccinated, wear a mask and improve ventilation to limit the spread.
She agrees, though, that public access to information about where the virus is spreading and who it is impacting needs to improve so people can make informed decisions.
“We need to continuously provide some of the epidemiologic information that we know about,’’ she said.
Provincial governments are telling Canadians to estimate their own sense of risk but those same governments are reducing the amount of data available, residents say.
“There’s no question that people are being provided less data,’’ said Tara Moriarty, a University of Toronto professor in the faculty of dentistry who studies infectious diseases. “It’s particularly critical because people have been made responsible for how they handle the pandemic and the decisions they make.’’
Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador are the only provinces that report daily COVID-19 data, she said in an interview Monday, adding that Canada does less COVID-19 testing per capita than other wealthy countries.
For the week ending April 9, an average of 1.46 COVID-19 tests per 1,000 people were conducted every day in Canada, according to Our World In Data, a global data website affiliated with Oxford University. In Austria, by contrast, 40.5 tests were conducted per 1,000 people. In Greece, Italy, the United Kingdom, France and South Korea, three times as many daily tests were conducted per capita as Canada. The website counts both PCR and antigen test results that are made public.
Tam said the number of tests performed per capita are increasing as the epidemic curve grows.
While wastewater testing has become a way to track the evolution of the pandemic, Moriarty said, it’s only being done in large cities in some provinces.
It’s not just an issue of data, she said, but also of communication. Government leaders, she explained, need to do a better job of communicating what the current situation is and who might be most at risk.
“You need to give people information so they can make better risk assessments and so that they can modify their behaviour accordingly,’’ she said. “If you withhold that information, or, by omission, just don’t provide it, you’re limiting the ability of people to act on that information.’’
By Jacob Serebrin and Laura Osman
The Canadian Press
