As provinces ask people to manage COVID risks, experts say the public has less data

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

Now the 68-year-old Armstrong 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. Meanwhile, data such as the location of outbreaks is no longer made public, she added.

“I think it’s very difficult for the average person to assess their own risk,” Armstrong said in an interview Monday. “Kingston is one of the hot spots in Ontario, but they still only release the information three times a week, and you can’t get tested unless you’re very high risk or very sick. So there’s no way of knowing.”

Health experts agree with Armstrong. Provincial governments are telling Canadians to calculate 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 getting less data,” said Tara Moriarty, a professor at the University of Toronto’s dental school who studies infectious diseases. “It’s particularly critical because people have been held accountable for how they handle the pandemic and the decisions they make.”

Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador are the only provinces reporting daily COVID-19 data, he said in an interview Monday, adding that Canada conducts fewer COVID-19 tests per capita than other wealthy countries.

During the week ending April 9, an average of 1.46 COVID-19 tests per 1,000 people were conducted every day in Canada, according to Our World In Data, a global data website affiliated with the University of Canada. Oxford. In Austria, by contrast, 40.5 tests were carried out per 1,000 people. In Greece, Italy, the United Kingdom, France and South Korea, there were three times as many daily tests per capita as in Canada. The website counts the results of the antigen and PCR tests that are made public.

While sewage testing has become a way to track the evolution of the pandemic, Moriarty said, it’s only done in big cities in a few provinces.

It’s not just a question of data, he said, but also of communication. Government leaders, she explained, need to do a better job of communicating what the current situation is and who might be most at risk.

“There is a need to give people information so they can make better risk assessments and so they can modify their behavior accordingly,” he said. “If you hide that information or by default just don’t provide it, you’re limiting people’s ability to act on that information.”

Jean-Paul Soucy, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto who studies infectious disease epidemiology, said some provinces, such as Nova Scotia, have stopped reporting region-specific data, making it difficult for residents to manage their own risk.

“COVID is not just one big outbreak in one country, it’s 1,000 small epidemics that are local,” he said in an interview Monday. “So the more local your information is, the more personalized your decision-making can be. Healthcare is local. If you need an ICU bed and there’s a free one in Kenora, that’s not going to be very helpful if you’re in Toronto.”

Soucy said he takes more precautions when the COVID-19 situation worsens and engages in riskier activities when the situation improves.

“An important component of public health is building trust,” he said. “And I think transparency builds trust.”

This report from The Canadian Press was first published on April 12, 2022.