Assessing your risk in Canada’s 6th wave will be difficult. Here’s why

Provincial governments are telling Canadians to estimate their own sense of risk, but those same governments are reducing the amount of data available to residents, experts say.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, retired teacher Lois Armstrong said local health officials where she lives in Kingston, Ont., provided daily updates about outbreaks, cases and deaths in the community.

Now, Armstrong, 68, said the public is being asked to take a bigger role in managing their risk but information from health authorities is less available than before. Data such as the location of outbreaks, meanwhile, is no longer made public, she added.

“I think it’s very difficult for the average person to assess their own risk,” Armstrong said Monday in an interview.

“Kingston is one of the hot spots of Ontario, but they still are only posting the information three times a week, and you can’t go get tested unless you’re really high risk or really sick. So there’s no way of knowing.”

Health experts agree with Armstrong. Provincial governments are telling Canadians to estimate their own sense of risk but those same governments are reducing the amount of data available to residents, they say.

“There’s no question that people are being provided less data,” said Tara Moriarty, a University of Toronto professor in the faculty of dentistry who studies infectious diseases.

“It’s particularly critical because people have been made responsible for how they handle the pandemic and the decisions they make.”

Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador are the only provinces that report daily COVID-19 data, she said in an interview Monday, adding that Canada does less COVID-19 testing per capita than other wealthy countries.