High January death toll partly due to Quebec’s slow COVID-19 booster rollout, experts say
Global News
Two health experts say the high COVID-19 death toll is due, in part, to Quebec's slow campaign to deliver booster doses to people 70 and older living outside institutional care.
January isn’t over, but with 1,217 COVID-19 deaths reported this month in Quebec, it’s already the fifth deadliest month of the COVID-19 pandemic in the province.
Two health experts say the high death toll is due, in part, to Quebec’s slow campaign to deliver booster doses to people 70 and older living outside institutional care.
“My hunch is that there is some sizable number of deaths and hospitalizations that could have been prevented if we had given our third dose earlier,” Dr. Quoc Dinh Nguyen, a gerontologist at Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal, said in an interview Tuesday.
As of Jan. 21, about 87 per cent of deaths linked to COVID-19 over the preceding 28 days involved people 70 and older. And unlike in previous waves, most of those who died were living at home instead of in long-term care homes or private seniors residences.
As well, of those people 70 and older who died in the current wave, 22 per cent were unvaccinated and 34.7 per cent had received a third dose of vaccine more than seven days before their deaths. The Health Department says 76 per cent of Quebecers 60 and over have received three doses of a COVID-19 vaccine and 94 per cent have received at least two.
Dr. Donald Vinh, an infectious disease specialist at the McGill University Health Centre, agrees with Nguyen. He said this month’s statistics — lower numbers of deaths in long-term care but higher numbers in the community — are the result of Quebec’s delayed third-dose vaccination campaign.
“There were vaccination teams that went into those institutions,” Vinh said in an interview Tuesday, referring to private seniors residences and to long-term care homes, known in Quebec as CHSLDs.
“So that was great — except if you were not institutionalized elderly,” he said.
