COVID CHRISTMAS IN CALGARY
Normal holiday doubtful, experts say
Christmas is only one month away, but instead of the usual onslaught of holiday music and mall Santas, Albertans are riding a second wave of COVID-19, with infection rates showing no sign of slowing.
Speaking from his Rideau Cottage home on Nov. 20, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau aimed to temper expectations for a typical holiday season.
“A normal Christmas is, quite frankly, out of the question. What it looks like depends on what we do now,” Trudeau said as he addressed Canadians.
It's a message local epidemiologists tend to agree with, as case rates continue to tick up in Alberta. The province recorded 1,227 new cases of the virus Thursday and set record highs for infections over much of the past week, including 1,584 cases reported Sunday.
In response to the mounting caseload, Alberta introduced an array of new restrictions Tuesday, banning indoor social gatherings and sending students in grades 7-12 home until after the holiday break beginning Nov. 30.
But Premier Jason Kenney declined to implement a more widespread lockdown, saying such an option would be an unwarranted violation of fundamental freedoms.
In an interview conducted before those restrictions were announced, Craig Jenne, University of Calgary infectious disease expert and associate professor, said it's very unlikely current case rates would flag soon enough for things to look dramatically better for the holidays.
“As we saw before, it takes a long time to bring a curve down,” Jenne said. “So unfortunately, I think we're going to be looking at a very high viral burden over the holiday season.”
Previous actions taken by the province to date have been “half measures,” according to University of Calgary developmental biologist Malgorzata Gasperowicz, who has been projecting exponential growth of Alberta's case count through the holiday season and beyond.
Gasperowicz has been tracking COVID-19 case data and using infection counts to extrapolate future case counts based on an observed doubling time. She said new daily case rates are doubling about every 2½ weeks, meaning there could be more than 5,000 daily cases in the province on Dec. 25 if growth trends continue.
“We will still go on the same trajectory with the same soft measures that we've had,” Gasperowicz said. “When you have a surge like this, those won't work.”
For University of Alberta School of Public Health epidemiologist Dean Eurich, a semi-normal holiday season is still in the cards, with individual quarantining before the holidays one way to minimize risk.
But no matter what, this will be a far cry from the Christmas parties and large family gatherings of previous years, he said.
“We're not going to have the office parties.
“You're probably not going to five or six different friends' houses like you may have wanted to in the past.”
That possibility of a somewhat normal Christmas would be dead in the water, however, if there isn't a “clear directional change” in the number of COVID-19 cases by about the first week of December, Eurich said.
Drastic measures could lead to a decrease in case rates by Christmas, Gasperowicz said. But she said daily death counts for mid- to late-december are likely locked in, together with hospital and ICU admissions, as a lagging indicator behind case counts. The province can expect to average 25 COVID-19 deaths daily by Dec. 11, she said.
“This will happen. It doesn't matter what (measures are put in place),” she said. “And the longer we wait to implement a lockdown, the bigger those daily deaths will be.”