Atlantic Canada’s successful COVID strategy is no match for Omicron

During most of the COVID-19 pandemic, Atlantic Canada won international praise for the region’s largely successful efforts to keep infection rates low, but the arrival of Omicron has changed its vaunted COVID-Zero strategy.

The highly contagious variant, now described as the fastest-spreading virus in human history, has outpaced the four provinces’ approach of hardening quickly, which involved swiftly imposing the country’s most stringent lockdown measures at the first sign of attack. an outbreak.

It may sound ridiculous now, but in April of last year, Nova Scotia called in the military and declared a two-week shutdown when the province recorded just 96 new infections – at the time, a one-day record.

Last Sunday, with Omicron on the move, Nova Scotia reported another record: 1,184 cases in one day.

“In the early stages of the pandemic, the transmissibility (of COVID-19) was much lower,” said Susan Kirkland, head of the department of community health and epidemiology at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

“It was possible to maintain this COVID-Zero strategy. We did our best to identify each case with a thorough contact tracing … But now we are in a completely different phase of the pandemic.”

On Wednesday, New Brunswick health officials confirmed that the province would stop including the number of daily cases confirmed by PCR testing in its press releases because the latest numbers no longer reflect the severity of the situation in the province.

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Earlier that day, Prince Edward Island had reported 222 new cases, a daily record. Before Omicron arrived in Canada in late November, the Island had registered a total of just 373 positive cases since the start of the pandemic.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, where the number of cases has also skyrocketed, the healthcare system is under considerable pressure because around 1,000 healthcare workers are isolated or infected with COVID-19. The province’s medical director of health, Dr. Janice Fitzgerald, admitted Monday that “most people” will contract the virus and that the latest measures are aimed at slowing the spread.

“Omicron’s transmissibility is so great that a COVID-Zero strategy is simply not feasible,” said Kirkland, who is also a member of the federal government’s COVID-19 immunity task force. “It is not useful at the moment. It is not the correct strategy.”

The strict lockdowns, which strained the Atlantic economy, simply don’t make sense at a time when virus-related hospitalizations in the region remain low, thanks to high vaccination rates that may have lessened Omicron’s impact on health. public, he said.

But it would be a mistake to assume that the COVID-Zero approach was undermined solely by Omicron’s ultra-rapid spread, says Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist at the University of Toronto.

It’s important to remember that one of the key pillars of the strategy, the Atlantic Bubble, was largely abandoned across the region in November 2020, Furness said in an interview. The new policy allowed residents of the region to travel between the four provinces, but imposed a mandatory 14-day quarantine for visitors from outside the region, a measure that kept travel-related infections under control.

Each of the Atlantic provinces maintained its own travel restrictions after the bubble burst, but most of those measures were modified as the pandemic evolved and vaccination rates increased.

Furness said travel restrictions remain an effective means of controlling the spread of contagious viruses.

But Kirkland said the Atlantic bubble was not sustainable.

“We had the Atlantic Bubble and it was very effective in the first wave of the pandemic, but this is part of learning to live with the pandemic,” he said. “We cannot isolate ourselves from the world forever … For us in the Atlantic region, it has been difficult for us to adapt because we have been very vigilant.”

However, that sense of vigilance faded in July 2021 when New Brunswick essentially debunked the region’s constant public messages about COVID-19. Prime Minister Blaine Higgs decided that his province would be the first in the region to lift all health protection orders, including requirements for wearing masks.

“New Brunswick separated itself from the rest,” Furness said, adding that vaccination rates in the province also fell to a snail’s pace. “That really fractured the region.”

In late September, the resulting spike in Delta variant infections and hospitalizations led the Higgs to impose so-called breaker lockouts that were extended in October. A senior provincial health official later admitted that the decision to lift all restrictions was a mistake.

“Now, (the Atlantic region) has a real uphill battle,” Furness said. You have squandered all the social capital you have.

For the past 14 days, Atlantic Canada’s per capita infection rate has been below the national average, but was higher than that of any other province and territory except Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba, according to federal figures.

This Canadian Press report was first published on January 6, 2022.