Deadliest month: New Brunswick ends January with a record 78 deaths related to COVID

New Brunswick closed the door on its grimmest month of the pandemic Monday, with five new COVID 19-related deaths.

It pushed the number of people lost to the virus in the province in January to 78, a new single-month record in Atlantic Canada. It broke the region's old record of 58, which was also set by New Brunswick in October.

"We realize we have had a high number of deaths in recent months,"  Premier Blaine Higgs acknowledged last week. "Especially compared to previous waves."

All provinces have been coping with a wave of COVID-related deaths after being inundated with new cases caused by the highly transmissible Omicron variant.

Health experts in Ontario told CBC News last week the sheer volume of cases is behind rising death tolls there.

"We're seeing scales of infection that we have not seen in the entire epidemic to date," said Tara Moriarty, an infectious disease researcher and associate professor at the University of Toronto. 

"There are going to be a lot of deaths, even if the virus is half as severe [as previous variants]."

Dr. Jerome Leis, medical director of infection prevention and control at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto,  agreed.

The Omicron variant "has likely infected more people in five weeks than all of the rest of the pandemic combined," he said.

"By virtue of so many infections, even a milder severity will translate into a significant number of hospitalizations and deaths, and that's what we're seeing now."

The problem was even more severe in New Brunswick last month.

Ontario recorded 1,250 COVID-related deaths in January, a rate of 8.6 per 100,000 Ontario residents. New Brunswick posted a rate of 9.8 deaths per 100,000, nearly 17 per cent higher.  

Once a rare occurrence in New Brunswick, deaths related to COVID-19 have become increasingly common, tracking at per capita levels higher than the national average in three of the last four months.

It's been a difficult development to fully explain in a province that, as recently as last summer, had one of the lowest death rates from the virus in the world.