The BC government’s new weekly system of reporting COVID-19 data will include an “over-counting” of coronavirus-related deaths, according to health officials.
Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said the weekly reports will be generated automatically, and feature a count of every person who died while coronavirus-positive over the preceding 30 days.
“We’ll be transitioning to a new way of reporting people who’ve died from COVID, and it’s going to be looking at 30-day all-cause mortality,” Henry said at a modeling presentation Tuesday.
“That means we will be over-counting people early on.”
Under BC’s current system of releasing pandemic data every weekday, public health teams are responsible for manually investigating each death to determine if COVID-19 was a factor. This has led to a number of data corrections over the course of the crisis, as teams struggled to keep up with narrow reporting windows.
Henry said the government will still work to separate coronavirus-related deaths from those in which someone was incidentally infected with COVID-19, but the process will take longer – weeks or months, in some cases, as causes of death are confirmed through Vital Statistics .
Henry said once information comes in, the province’s death toll will be “updated on a rolling basis.”
“That gives us a more accurate picture of all-cause impacts from COVID-19,” she added.
She warned the public to expect a jump in COVID-19 deaths early in the transition, which is happening this Thursday.
The previously announced change to weekly reporting has been met with pushback, and renewed concerns about government transparency during the pandemic.
BC Green Leader Sonia Furstenau slammed the province Tuesday for offering less data at a time when the Omicron subvariant BA.2 has already fueled increases in transmission and hospitalizations.
“This government is desperate to maintain its narrative around its management of this pandemic, and is doing so by limiting testing, monitoring, and reporting. They have closed down community monitoring at the beginning of a sixth wave,” Furstenau said in a statement.
“We have seen in other jurisdictions, like Peterborough, Ont., for example, where data transparency and public guidance are the focus of a responsible public health body. It is not an impossible task for this government to provide clear guidance to the public on what level of risk they are at.”