Vaccination data errors raise questions

Experts concerned over province’s ability to track effort after correction

Ontario’s over-reporting of the number of people who have received two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine calls into question the government’s ability to track the progress of its own vaccination rollout, experts say.

The province revealed Thursday its reporting of the number of Ontarians who have received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines for the last month was double the true number.

So while Ontarians had been led to believe that 96,459 people had been fully vaccinated. As of the middle of this week, the number was 55,286.

This represents about 0.4 per cent of Ontario’s population.

“That tells me there’s some real disorganization going on and not a lot of oversight,” said Colin Furness, an infection-control epidemiologist at the University of Toronto.

“It erodes public trust. It makes people cynical. It gives rise to conspiracy theories. Any time that you’re being sloppy with your information, you’re creating a lot of room for people to be critical.”

The error comes at a time of heightened anxiety amid delays in the Pfizer vaccine deliveries. (Canada will receive no doses of the vaccine this week.) Deaths at long-term-care facilities where inoculations are desperately needed, are rising.

At the root of the over-reporting was a misinterpretation by officials of the category for “total vaccinations completed” published on the province’s COVID-19 vaccine website, a Health Ministry spokesperson said.

“Rather than provide data on the number of people who have been fully vaccinated… officials inadvertently provided data on the number of doses administered to achieve full vaccination,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to reporters early Thursday morning. “As a result, the number of people who have been fully vaccinated is half of what is currently listed.”

The number was corrected about 10:30 a.m. Thursday.

The Ministry of Health stressed that this was simply a reporting error in the way the data was posted to the website and that it has no impact on the government’s plan to administer second doses.

“To protect access to second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for those who have already received their first dose, the Province will maintain the maximum interval of 21-27 days for long-term care, retirement and First Nations, elder-care, home-resident groups, and up to 42 days between the two doses for all other groups,” the ministry said in an email to the Star.

So far, a total of 317,240 doses have been administered in Ontario. According to the province’s latest figures, as of 8 p.m. Wednesday, 51,595 of Ontario’s 72,000 or so long-term-care residents had been given a vaccination; 66,995 doses had been administered to long-termcare home health-care workers; 18,669 doses were administered to retirement home healthcare workers; and 25,866 retirement home residents were also vaccinated.

The province stressed that these numbers underestimate matters, because they do not account for paper-based reports for Moderna vaccines not yet entered in the provincial database.

Raywat Deonandan, an epidemiologist at the University of Ottawa, called the misreporting a “proxy indicator for competence.”

“So many times throughout this pandemic, we’ve seen a failure of data transparency and a failure of rigour in how data is compiled and shared and processed and interpreted, at least on the website,” he said. “You start to wonder, is the data processing system in the backbone of public health in Ontario broken fundamentally?”

The vaccination reporting error is one of several COVID-19 data integrity issues to emerge from the province over the past 10 months.

In April last year, the province quietly changed the way it reported daily testing data from the number of patients tested, to the number of samples tested. This made it difficult, if not impossible, to figure out how many people the province was testing for COVID-19 at the time.

A month later, the Star found that Public Health Ontario had miscategorized more than 5,000 cases of the virus as having an unknown transmission source. In fact, the province did have source data for those cases, which were associated with outbreaks.