Where is Canada on COVID front?
‘WE’RE KIND OF IN THIS WEIRD PLACE’ ... BUILDING COMMUNITY IMMUNITY, SCIENTIST SAYS
People are posting selfies of their positive rapid tests all over social media, Saskatchewan’s sixth wave is seeing record hospitalizations of Covid-positive people and Ontario’s chief medical officer of health is warning of a “difficult week” ahead.
However, there are signs the latest wave may be peaking in parts of Canada, though the impact of the recent long holiday weekend is still a bit of a wild card, federal health officials said Friday.
Where is the country at with COVID? “In a way we’re kind of in this weird place. And where we are is really building community immunity,” said Dr. Doug Manuel, a physician and senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and a member of Ontario’s COVID-19 science advisory table.
Every stage and every phase is different, he said. In the first wave, there were no vaccines and distancing and rolling lockdowns reduced infections. “Now we have infection and vaccine,” Manuel said. The end game for endemicity — a relatively stable number of infections, without large outbreaks that burn through populations — is gradually increasing community immunity, he said, “either through the easy way (vaccinations) or the hard way.” The Ottawa doctor, who is fully vaccinated, said the safest way to build immunity is through vaccination. It’s hard to know just how much virus is circulating, and where. Provinces have stopped widespread PCR testing and the results of athome tests aren’t reported or tracked. Manuel, who heads a national waste water surveillance group, was into day 12 of a COVID infection late last week. On a recent call, “three of the four of us had active infections,” he said. “I call it like flu. Not the worst thing. But slowed down and tired.” One colleague, however, was laid up for weeks.
Nationally, the test positivity rate, the number of lab-based, PCR tests coming back positive, sat at 18 per cent during the latest reported seven-day period (April 13 to 19). Canada’s seven-day rolling average of confirmed cases was 9,885 on April 23, down from 13,731 a week earlier. But the official tallies are enormous underestimates because testing is limited to high-risk groups.
Ontario’s science advisers believe the province is seeing between 100,000 and 120,000 new cases a day, and that up to six million Ontarians have been infected with Omicron since December.
Wastewater signals are highs in parts of Alberta, including Edmonton and Calgary, but mixed in Ontario, where it’s not clear whether levels are cresting. Still, hospitalizations haven’t been matching waste water signals. Nationally, critical care is “currently trending at low levels,” Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam said Friday.
One hypothesis is that a lot of the transmission is occurring among younger people, where there’s lots of social mixing, “and we haven’t reached the vulnerable groups yet,” Manuel said. “After a while you just can’t avoid it. It moves over to the older folks, or the more vulnerable folks.”
In an interview with Global News Friday, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. Kieran Moore, said hospital admissions could peak this coming week, with 2,000 in hospital with COVID, including 240 in intensive care.
The other hypothesis is that community immunity, through vaccinations and past infections in vulnerable populations is getting stronger, “and we’re not going to be hit as hard this time,” Manuel said.
Anti-virals are now available to people at risk of bad outcomes, but people are having serious trouble getting them. “Both grandparents have COVID and it was an absolute mess last week trying to get them assessed for consideration of outpatient treatment in Ontario,” Dr. Alainna Jamal tweeted this weekend. Omicron, especially for the vaccinated, tends to cause relatively mild cold-like symptoms for the otherwise healthy. But doctors say it’s not only the vulnerable at risk.
“I have been an emergency physician for 20 years and I have never seen a young, healthy person die from a cold,” Alberta’s Dr. Chuck Wurster tweeted Sunday morning. “I have never seen anyone become completely debilitated for months from a sniffle. I have seen both from COVID. Lots. You don’t want this virus. Wear a mask. Get boosted.”
A study published Saturday in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine based on more than 2,000 British adults hospitalized with COVID found that only around one in four felt fully well again, one year later. Fatigue, muscle pain, feeling physically slowed down, poor sleep and breathlessness were the most common lingering symptoms reported.