COVID caseload passes 100,000
Canadian figures show successes, failures in response, experts say
Canada’s struggle against the COVID-19 pandemic passed a bleak milestone on Thursday, with data from one of the hardest-hit provinces pushing the national caseload over the 100,000 threshold.
The national tally, reached after Ontario reported 173 new cases, secured Canada’s place among the 20 countries hardest-hit by the coronavirus since its global spread began just six months ago.
Medical experts say the Canadian figures highlight both successes and failures in Canada’s response to the pandemic.
“It could have been much more than that had we not implemented the measures we did when we did,” said Dr. Susy Hota, medical director of infection prevention and control at Toronto’s University Health Network. “We did not overwhelm the system in that initial wave that hit the country.”
Hota said the medical community was awake to the possibility of a serious medical crisis ahead of the population at large, who for weeks were told that a new form of coronavirus originating in the Chinese city of Wuhan posed a minimal to low risk to Canadians.
Early literature on the disease eventually dubbed COVID-19 sounded tentative alarm bells for doctors before the federal government launched an information blitz aimed at curbing its spread on Jan. 24, she said.
Government assurances that the disease had not reached Canadian shores had to be abandoned the next day when a Toronto man returning from a visit to Wuhan was identified as the country’s first COVID-19 patient. Three days later, another case was diagnosed in British Columbia.
The small number of cases that cropped up in those provinces over the month of February were all linked to recent travel to either China or Iran and not believed to pose an imminent health risk.
The World Health Organization’s March 11 decision to classify the virus as a global pandemic touched off a wave of closures and emergency public health measures around the world, and it wasn’t long before Canadian officials got on board.
On March 14, the federal government urged Canadians abroad to hasten home, and the country’s top public health officer shifted the government’s message about the virus the next day amid rising cases of COVID-19 in at least five provinces.
“Our window to flatten the curve of the epidemic is narrow,” Dr. Theresa Tam said at a March 15 news conference. “We all need to act now. COVID-19 is a serious public health threat.”
One week later, most schools, offices and non-essential businesses across Canada had shut their doors, ushering in an era of self-isolation that lasted for months.
In most provinces, the lockdowns were supported by dire projections about the thousands of people who could die without aggressive public health measures to limit the spread of the virus.
While the numbers never reached the levels mapped out in provincial models, case numbers still mounted rapidly across most of the country. The totals were especially staggering in long-term-care homes and other group-living facilities.
Outbreaks at homes in Quebec and Ontario, deemed so severe that they could not be controlled without help from the Canadian Armed Forces, exposed a litany of horrific conditions, including patient neglect and chronic understaffing. The issues raised have prompted pledges of reform from provincial and federal officials alike.
But while Canada’s provinces and territories largely travelled the same path to lockdown, the road to recovery has looked markedly different from one jurisdiction to the next.
While Ontario continues to log more than 170 new cases a day as of Thursday, officials in B.C. declared the regional curve was flattening on April 17.
Public health experts all agree the virus has not yet run its course in Canada, urging caution as reopening efforts ramp up across the country.
Meanwhile, a made-in-Canada mobile app to alert Canadians who may have been exposed to a person infected with COVID-19 is ready for testing in Ontario, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Thursday.
Trudeau said using the app is completely voluntary and it will not share or store any personal information, including a user’s geographical location.
The app was developed by Canadian Digital Service, Ontario Digital Service, Blackberry and volunteers from Shopify who helped build it. The app uses Bluetooth software that was developed by phone-makers like Apple and Google. It creates and shares an anonymous identification code from your phone to any phone that also has the app and comes into close proximity with your own for an extended period of time. Your phone will also collect codes from those phones and store them for 14 days.
If you, or any of those phone owners, are diagnosed with COVID-19, public health officials will help you upload that fact to the app, and any phones that were logged by yours in the previous 14 days will receive a notification that the user may have been exposed. Those users will be asked to contact health authorities for help.
Trudeau said the federal privacy commissioner was involved in the development and every consideration has been given to protecting privacy.