This text is taken from our newsletter “Coronavirus mail” of April 25, 2022. To subscribe, click here.
Screening tests are no longer enough to estimate the comings and goings of COVID-19 waves, and the INSPQ is now turning to polls to estimate pandemic trends.
CIRANO experts have until now used the tests to assess the progression of the pandemic in Quebec, but they will soon cease this activity.
The government’s public health experts thus take over and have begun to survey Quebecers. They plan to ask 30,000 Quebecers every week if they have ever had COVID-19 and if they or someone around them has fallen ill in the last seven days.
By estimating that each person speaks for a hundred knowledge, “it’s as if we had information for 300,000 people”, explains to Duty the scientific coordinator and statistician Denis Hamel.
“We don’t pretend to have a precise number,” puts Mr. Hamel into perspective. His team and his work make it possible “above all to determine whether there is an upward or downward trend”.
The statisticians will maintain this same biased methodology, which will make it possible in the long term to compare the responses and thus offer the public and the decision-makers a vision of the “trend parallel to the true curve”.
Current data indicates that the virus is still widely circulating in the Quebec population, as shown in the graph above.
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