Long a pandemic leader, Nova Scotia is now a COVID-19 hot spot
CBC
Nova Scotia's past success at managing the COVID-19 pandemic is also one of the reasons why its daily case counts have never been worse, say two infectious disease experts.
The province has long been lauded for its handling of the pandemic, but daily case counts from the highly transmissible Omicron and BA.2 variants have been rising since late February. They have accelerated dramatically since the Nova Scotia government lifted most public health restrictions on March 21, including gathering limits and mandatory masking in most public places.
"The fact that it continues to go up and the percentage of people that are positive in that group means that there's really a lot of virus out there," said Dr. Lisa Barrett, an infectious diseases doctor and researcher at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
Last Thursday, the most recent COVID-19 weekly reporting date, the province announced an average of almost 1,000 new daily cases, an all-time high since the pandemic began.
Barrett said the lack of mandatory masking rules in most settings combined with a large swath of the population without a previous COVID-19 infection has made Nova Scotia especially vulnerable.
"All those people who hadn't really been exposed before are getting infected, pretty much all at once, which was really what we wanted to avoid," said Barrett.
As well, despite high two-dose vaccination rates in Nova Scotia, booster uptake hasn't been as strong, said Barrett. Among Nova Scotians over the age of 18, only 63.9 per cent have had a booster dose, according to the provincial COVID-19 dashboard.
Officials in Nova Scotia have stressed that the emphasis should be on COVID-19 hospitalizations, not case numbers. But experts point out that as infections rise, hospitalizations are sure to follow.
"The problem is that by the time they're going up, it's too late," said Tara Moriarty, an associate professor and infectious diseases researcher at the University of Toronto.
While the official new daily case count for Nova Scotia was around 1,000 as of last Thursday, Moriarty believes it's more in the neighbourhood of 10 times that. She's developed a public spreadsheet that uses modelling to provide a more accurate picture of the COVID-19 situation in Canada.
"Since we've really started testing a lot less, I and others have been trying to develop methods that give us a sense of how many infections are actually occurring on a daily basis and how many hospitalizations, for example, ICU admissions and deaths we might expect from those," said Moriarty.
She said data reporting is poor across the country, so it's difficult for people to accurately assess what the risk levels are of contracting COVID-19.
"It's really quite serious," she said. "And a lot of Atlantic Canada has been far worse off over the last month than most other provinces."
That could extend to North America.
When the New Brunswick Health Council released its report this week on avoidable deaths in the province, one area stood out.
Almost once a month for almost a year, Kathleen Toman has left her home in Balsam Lake, Ont., for Mont-Tremblant, Que. This weekend, she’ll make the 500-kilometre trip again, meeting her ex-husband, Chris Toman, there.
A charity in Chase, B.C., has secured funding that it hopes will improve child-care services in the community by training new childhood educators.
Ontario is seeking feedback on a potential amendment to the Coroners Act that may replace mandatory inquests into jail deaths with coroner-led annual reviews.
Paul Myllyniemi takes the bus to work in Thunder Bay, Ont., every day — except when it doesn’t show up.
Residents in the Greater Toronto Area are digging themselves out and going back to their regular weekday schedules a day after a major snowstorm.
Commuters hoping to escape the cold by travelling on Line 6 will need to think again, as train service is down Friday morning.
Halim Rahim has lived in Canada for almost four years, but says he’s never experienced a winter like this.
For Lindsay Gillan, walking her dog, Daisy, twice a day in Charlottetown’s Victoria Park is a treasured routine that benefits both her physical and mental health.
Whitehorse city council has postponed its decision on an overhaul of its zoning bylaws that would, among other things, introduce short-term rental regulations in the city.
Prime Minister Mark Carney says he has reached a deal with China to allow tens of thousands of Chinese electric vehicles into the country in exchange for lower canola duties.
The Federal Court of Appeal is expected to give its decision Friday morning on whether the Liberal government unlawfully invoked the Emergencies Act to clear the convoy protests that gridlocked the capital city and border points nearly four years ago.
WARNING: This article describes allegations of sexual assault.