While academics debate whether COVID-19 has gone into the endemic phase, it’s safe to say that most Manitobans are out of the pandemic.
The barriers to movement have disappeared. The workers are back in the offices. Wearing a mask is optional in most public places.
After two and a half years, life is pretty much back to normal for the vast majority of people.
Yet one troublesome statistic remains: More people died in 2022 from either COVID-19 or its association in this province than in each of the first two years of the pandemic.
From Dec. On January 19, the last date for which data is available, 2,350 Manitobans who contracted COVID-19 died from the virus or a related illness.
In 2020, 667 Manitobans died from COVID-19. This figure rose to 725 deaths from COVID-19 in 2021.
And from Dec. 19,958 people in this province have died from or related to COVID-19, according to Manitoba Public Health.
Unusual situation
This creates an unusual situation where the deadliest year of the pandemic is also the year most of us decided the pandemic was over.
“I think if you showed the average Manitoban these statistics, they would be surprised,” said Dr. Jillian Horton, Health Sciences Center intern and author who frequently comments on the pandemic. “I think most people taking a multiple-choice test would not guess correctly that more Manitobans have died this year from COVID than the previous two years.
“I think most people on the street, if they didn’t have a reason to follow the data and the headlines very closely, would be like, ‘Yeah, the pandemic is over, it’s not really a big deal, “but that’s certainly not the reality for patients and it’s not the reality inside our hospital.”
For public health and epidemiology experts, the rise in COVID-19 deaths this year comes as no surprise. Thanks to more contagious variants of SARS-CoV-2 such as Omicron and its subvariants, almost everyone has been exposed to COVID-19 in 2022, these experts believe.
WATCH | Is the COVID-19 pandemic almost over?
Social behavior is an important indicator of whether the COVID-19 pandemic is considered over, even if there are 30 deaths a day, says Toronto pulmonologist Dr. Samir Gupta.
This means that the case fatality rate of COVID-19 – the proportion of people who die from the virus after contracting it – has dropped drastically this year.
The implication is that the COVID-19 we have in North America right now is far less severe than the virus that circulated in the fall of 2020, primarily due to widespread vaccinations.
The idea that newer variants are inherently less severe still isn’t settled by science, says Dr. Jason Kindrachuk, the University of Manitoba medical microbiologist who has become the province’s best-known expert on emerging pathogens during the pandemic.
“You can have viruses that have low casualty rates that still have big impacts if they spread widely enough in the community,” Kindrachuk said in an interview.
“We have to understand that even if it ends up being a true, milder form of the disease, if it spreads widely enough in the population, it can still have big impacts.”
Kindrachuk, whose work is now more focused on monitoring the spread of Mpox, says the emergence of new coronavirus variants is almost inevitable. However, this is only of concern if one or more of these variants is found to be significantly more transmissible, more severe, or more able to evade immunity.
The dire situation unfolding in China, which recently eased harsh pandemic restrictions, may have no bearing on COVID-19 in North America, he says.
Indeed, China has developed a different and less effective COVID-19 vaccine, compared to the highly effective mRNA products deployed in much of the Western world. China has also vaccinated a smaller proportion of its population.
“China can be very different from what we see in the rest of the world due to these other factors, so we have to be careful,” Kindrachuk said.
greater danger
A greater danger in North America could be the lack of effective communication on how to keep COVID-19 at bay.
Canada hasn’t done enough to promote the benefits of ventilating buildings, wearing masks and tracking vaccine boosters, Horton says.
“We’re actually getting a very low mark on our overall national effort to address the suffering, death and burden of illness that comes with illness,” she said.
“People are really surprised when they hear things like COVID increase your risk of diabetes within a year of infection or the relationship between COVID and potential heart disease.”
It is unclear if widespread changes are made to building design to provide better ventilation as they did in the 1920s after the 1918-2020 flu epidemic ended.
Kindrachuk says he’s not sure Canada is better prepared for the next pandemic, even after learning hard lessons over the past three years.
“Infrastructure doesn’t happen overnight. Knowledge doesn’t happen overnight. Diffusion of that knowledge certainly doesn’t happen either,” he said.
“We have to move forward and we appreciate that in the meantime we will continue to see new viruses and new infectious diseases emerge or reappear and we will have to try to learn very quickly.”
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