Scientists out in the cold on hot spots

Advisory group says government decided on priority COVID areas

Ontario's arm's-length science advisory table says it had no direct input into the selection of COVID-19 hot spots across the province, contrary to what provincial officials suggested earlier this week.

“We shared our scientific argument with the government, but we understand that the government itself decided which neighbourhoods to actually prioritize,” said Robert Steiner, communications director with the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table.

Sources have told the Citizen that members of the science table have been frustrated by the suggestion from the government that it played a key role in selecting the list of hot spots or made recommendations.

That selection process has become controversial because a small number of the 114 hot spots, identified by a list of postal codes released by the province, have lower rates of COVID-19 than other communities that were not selected.

Opposition Leader Andrea Horwath has called for a review of the way the hot spots were selected.

One of them, in the Kanata area, has come under a spotlight — it has had relatively low rates of cases and the second-lowest positivity rate in the city, according to the independent health data organization ICES.

It doesn't contain multiple — if any — large congregate settings, as suggested by Health Minister Christine Elliott this week. Nor does it include any of the 21 Ottawa neighbourhoods that have been identified as high-risk for serious illness and death by Ottawa Public Health, based on neighbourhood data.

In an answer to questions this week, Elliott said politics played no role in selection of the hot spots. She said they were chosen based on historical data and in consultation with advisers.

During a technical briefing, a government official called selection of the hot spots, “evidence- and science-based,” adding: “It was primarily research and analysis conducted by Ontario's COVID-19 Science Advisory Table as well as additional outbreak data obtained from the provincial case and contact management system and outbreaks and case data from ministry databases.”

The science advisory table produced a document in February that influenced the government's move to prioritize the hardest-hit areas based on forward sortation areas (the first three digits of a postal code), but it did not play a role in deciding which ones should be on a list. The research illustrated the disparity between hot spots and other neighbourhoods and showed that more hospitalizations and deaths could be prevented by targeting high-risk groups and neighbourhoods.

“Our aim was to illustrate the need to target both age and neighbourhood in vaccine rollout; not to list specific neighbourhoods for prioritization,” Steiner said.

In a statement released Thursday, Premier Doug Ford's office defended the inclusion of the K2V postal code as a hot spot, saying the area had 44 per cent more cases per 10,000 than the provincial average since January, as well as 25 per cent more COVID-19 deaths than the provincial average during that span.

“These indicators were considered in addition to the fact that this postal code's sociodemographic data from the most recent census shows a racialized community of over 40 per cent,” the statement said.

A spokesperson for the premier's office said: “We didn't mean to imply the science table selected the postal codes, but rather their analysis was a leading contributor to how they were selected.”

Meanwhile, local city councillors have been among those scratching their heads about how K2V, which is in Long-Term Care Minister Merrilee Fullerton's riding, made the list in a city with previously identified high-risk neighbourhoods that were not provincial hot spots.

City officials said they have used their own data to identify hot spots in Ottawa and will continue to work there. In fact, Ottawa Public Health began doing so early in March as a means of targeting the city's most vulnerable with scarce vaccines, determined by age and neighbourhood.

The province says local public health units can identify the targeted areas they see as at most risk. But by listing K2V among provincial hot spots, residents there will still get priority access to vaccines — everyone over 50 for now and, eventually, everyone over 18, according to Ford. Local companies and religious institutions in hot spots can also sponsor vaccination clinics for the community, Ford said.

K2V is one of three hot spots identified by the province in Ottawa. The two others, K1V and K1T, in the Greenboro and Hunt Club areas, contain several high-risk neighbourhoods where Ottawa Public Health continues to hold pop-up clinics to prioritize local residents for vaccines.

The K2V forward sortation area is a small neighbourhood straddling Kanata South and Stittsville that runs south of the Queensway and east of Terry Fox Drive. It includes the Canadian Tire Centre and Costco as well as other commercial areas. Its residential areas are largely composed of single-family homes and townhouses.

According to Ottawa neighbourhood data, its COVID case numbers are around 20 per cent of some of the hardest-hit neighbourhoods in the city. Ford's office also accused the opposition parties of politicizing the province's efforts to vaccinate high-risk neighbourhoods, arguing all the hot spot postal codes were “identified based on analysis conducted by the COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, which relied on Public Health Ontario data and were confirmed by the non-partisan vaccine task force.”

“Their analysis specifically looked at criteria including hospitalizations, outbreak data, low testing rates and deaths during the second wave of the pandemic. This work applied an anti-racism lens to ensure Ontario protects vulnerable communities,” the statement read.

“Regions in the highest 20 per cent were identified as hot spot communities. Regions in the top 30 per cent that faced additional barriers, including sociodemographic ones, were also included.

Some members of city council and others have speculated that K2V could have been a typo or a mishearing of K2B, the postal code of the area in Britannia and Bayshore that contains neighbourhoods identified as high-risk by Ottawa Public Health and high-density congregate settings. It also has among the highest concentration of seniors in the province.

In fact, when Elliott described why the province had selected K2V as a hot spot, she could have been describing K2B, saying it had a high number of congregate settings, retirement homes, long-term care homes and seniors apartments, none of which exist in K2V.