The number of cases of contamination in Canada seems to have reached its peak and even started to go down, but it will be necessary to wait “a few more weeks” before seeing the same phenomenon on the side of hospitalizations.
“Early indications show that infections may indeed have peaked nationwide,” Dr Howard Njoo said during a virtual press briefing on Friday along with his colleague, the Chief Health Officer. of Canada, Theresa Tam.
“However, the daily number of hospitalizations and people in intensive care continues to soar. Many hospitals in Canada are under great pressure,” he said.
Providing an update on the national situation, Drs. Tam and Njoo noted that there are still 6.5 million Canadians who have yet to receive a first or second dose of the COVID vaccine. -19.
“It’s always an opportunity for the virus to keep circulating,” Howard Njoo lamented, suggesting that “to motivate [les non-vaccinés] it may be necessary to give certain privileges to vaccinated people to enter public spaces, restaurants.
“It’s a way,” he said, an idea that has already been implemented in Quebec with the vaccine passport.
Hospitalizations up, infections down
The figures released on Friday are dizzying: last week, 10,000 people were treated every day in Canadian hospitals, a peak never reached during previous waves, and 1,100 were in intensive care. In addition, the average daily death rate was 131 people.
The very high mortality, however, is not attributable to the virulence of the Omicron variant, but to the fact that the transmissibility of this variant led to an explosion in the number of cases, argued Theresa Tam. “It is because of the large volume of cases. At the beginning of the Omicron wave, it was very concentrated among young adults. It then spread to other age groups. The vast majority of severe cases are therefore still found in the elderly, people over the age of 60. There are also cases of severe damage in children, but they are still very rare,” she said.
The number of hospitalizations and intensive care admissions “continues to skyrocket”, Dr Njoo said, saying he expects a plateau and a gradual decline won’t occur until later in February.
In contrast, the number of new daily infections has fallen by 28%, but Drs Tam and Njoo believe that the true number of cases is underestimated due to a testing capacity that is exceeded by the number of cases. .
Airports: maintenance of systematic screening
Federal public health does not intend to recommend a return to random screening at airports at this time.
“We see that the positivity rates have increased for several weeks. […] This is very important for surveillance, because it is not only a question of diagnosing individual travelers, but also of detecting perhaps a new variant,” explained Howard Njoo.
He did not want to comment on the disparities in health rules and their relaxation from one province to another, arguing that the extent of the Canadian territory implied different situations for which it was necessary to rely on the authorities. public health authorities in each province.
Plan for the future
Strongly hoping to enter a new phase by the end of February, Theresa Tam argued that it was time to plan now.
“We need to focus on our goals of reducing serious illness, mortality as well as reducing social disruption. This balance remains to be found. There is no doubt that no one wants to see all these restrictive measures anymore and Omicron may or may not have brought us closer to this new reality,” she said.
“Perhaps later we will have to examine what the balance is for the capacity of the health system to be ready for a next pandemic”, advanced Doctor Njoo, stressing on several occasions that the pressure was unsustainable in several hospitals.
Treat COVID like the flu?
Both doctors said they believe COVID will be around long-term after the current wave, but could eventually become a respiratory infection like others.
“The overall view at this point is that the Omicron virus will be with us for a long time and we need to take a longer-term approach to vaccine strategies,” Dr. Tam said.
Considering a fourth dose if needed is one of the scenarios, she said, but it’s not impossible, either, that one day the annual coronavirus vaccination will be considered in the same way. than the one against the flu. “Everyone can understand that, for influenza for example, it has become an annual vaccine for decades. Repeated doses over the course of a lifetime is not really a concern,” she argued.