Quebecers have the power to reverse trend, Dubé says
Quebec's health minister says two studies published Friday show that Quebecers have the power to break this deadly second wave of COVID-19 if they act now to reduce their daily risky contacts by 25 per cent.
“If people were doubting whether the sacrifices they have been making are worth it, the (data) confirms that the efforts we are making have had a real impact,” Health Minister Christian Dubé said Friday in Montreal.
He urged all Quebecers to take a look at a new study by the Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ) to get a graphic idea of what was avoided by the measures the government introduced in early October, including shutting down restaurants and bars, and banning many sports and leisure activities.
The graphs project an almost vertical increase in cases, hospitalizations and deaths in Greater Montreal over the next three months if nothing had been done at that point.
“What I take from this is that if we had not put in place the measures that we did in October, the impact on our hospitals, on our health system, on deaths, would have gone beyond the results of the first wave,” Dubé said.
Dubé said another study released Friday, this one a weekly update on hospitalizations and health system capacity by the Institut national d'excellence en santé et en services sociaux (INESSS), is also encouraging. It projects hospitalizations are likely to stabilize across Quebec over the next few weeks, and the increase in hospitalizations foreseen for the Montreal region will be less than previously projected, so capacity should be adequate.
“Our efforts have been paying off, but we must continue if we want the cases to decline. ... We want to protect our health system and have as few victims as possible,” Dubé said.
Quebec confirmed 1,055 new COVID-19 cases across the province on Friday, bringing the total since the beginning of the pandemic to 91,018. Thirteen more COVID-19 deaths were confirmed, Dubé said, bringing the death toll in Quebec to 6,018.
Dubé stressed that when he speaks of the daily increase in hospitalizations, he is always talking about the net increase. In the previous 24 hours, for example, 59 more people were hospitalized in Quebec due to COVID-19, and 45 were discharged, for a net increase of 14.
The INSPQ study presents three scenarios, one which projects what would have happened if measures had not been put in place at the beginning of October, a second which projects results of just continuing with those measures, and a third which looks at results of continuing those measures plus an additional reduction of risky contacts by 25 per cent.
If Quebecers had reduced their contacts by 25 per cent compared to their September levels, with October's measures in place, the study projects hospitalizations and deaths would be stabilized over the next three months.
Dubé explained that before COVID, Quebecers had an average of seven or eight contacts per day with people outside of their own household. During the confinement last spring, average outside contacts per person per day went down to about three. Now, with the October measures in place, that average is at about five or six contacts per day.
Dubé urged those Quebecers who, despite public health directives, continue to have risky contacts — less than two metres from people with whom they do not reside, for longer than 15 minutes — to try to reduce those contacts by at least 25 per cent.
Quebec Public Health director Horacio Arruda stressed that authorities are not asking for additional efforts from people who have already reduced their daily contacts to essential and household contacts.
“We are talking about all the rest of the population who are active,” Arruda said. “Even I am asking myself the question, at work, sometimes I am in situations where I get close. We have to analyze ourselves, think about it, in the last weeks was there someone I invited over whom I should not have?”
Dubé too said the study has made him take a hard look at how he interacts with aides and cabinet colleagues. He said the government plans to use the new studies to launch new communications strategies to try to reach people who still don't realize how important it is to reduce their contacts.
“Quebecers have succeeded in changing the trend we were seeing last week. For me this is a concrete example of what can happen when we put our efforts together.”