Public isn't getting whole story on COVID, leaked report says

A pair of internal reports leaked from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control highlights that health authorities in B.C. are releasing only a fraction of their available COVID information to the public.

The internal reports — each over 45 pages — are four times longer than the weekly reports published by the centre. They delve into the details of COVID-19 case counts and vaccinations at the neighbourhood level, breakdowns about variants of concern, and more.

The reports include neighbourhood-level information on case and vaccination counts, for example, a level of detail the centre has so far refused to make public despite repeated calls from academics and researchers. The City of Toronto regularly publishes neighbourhood-level case and vaccination data, as well as breakdowns by age, income and ethnicity.

The reports also include information on vaccinations by age groups, something identified by the B.C. COVID-19 Modelling Group as a significant “data gap” in a recent report.

Dr. Caroline Colijn, Canada 150 Research Chair in Mathematics for Infection, Evolution and Public Health, said more details can help in understanding inequalities in the impacts of the pandemic and affect public health responses.

“When the Ontario science table put out a graphic that said vaccination wasn't reaching the people in harder hit communities, it caused change,” she said, noting “voices get amplified when they have data that you can point to.”

B.C. doesn't make anywhere near the same level of detail available to the public. Vaccination data is published largely at the health authority level, making it difficult for the public to know if cases or vaccination rates are higher in Vancouver or Richmond, for example.

Perhaps as a partial result, authorities in B.C. still struggle to contain cases and boost vaccination levels in some parts of the province, including Surrey, as detailed maps in the leaked reports show.

Giving the public access to more granular data could affect how people judge risk levels in their day-today activities, said Dr. Sarah Otto, Canada Research Chair in theoretical and experimental evolution at UBC. “You could imagine a faith leader looking and going `Holy smokes, there's no vaccinations in my community, I better go start spreading the word,'” she said.

The Centre for Disease Control didn't respond to emailed questions.

Colijn and Otto both acknowledged that communicating public health information is complex.

Public health needs to “avoid mixed messages,” said Otto. “And I completely understand that.”

“But by controlling the message so strongly,” she said, “I think it backfires a bit.”