With provinces releasing less frequent data on COVID-19 three years into the pandemic, a group of volunteer experts has been publishing your own case analysishighlighting a large underreporting of hospitalizations and deaths in Canada due to the Omicron variant.
Recent figures based on this analysis show that Omicron’s expected hospitalizations could be 70 percent higher on average than reported since December 2, 2021, if the rest of the country reported as Quebec did.
“If every province were to report similarly to Quebec, which is the gold standard in Canada for full and timely reporting of severe COVID outcomes, then these numbers would look very different from what has been reported,” said Tara Moriarty, infectious disease specialist. expert at the University of Toronto and co-founder of COVID-19 Resources Canadahe told CTVNews.ca on Tuesday.
The difference is also significant for Omicron fatalities, which are expected to be 51 percent higher than reported, according to the data.
“It became critical to provide this information to the public,” Moriarty said.
Founded in March 2020, the grassroots initiative, made up of scientists, health professionals and web developers, collects data from different sources, including information from provincial databases and Statistics Canada, and gets its funding from the Health Agency Canada Public.
OMICRON’S EXPECTED CASES IN CANADA ARE UNREPORTED
As of December 2, 2021, Omicron’s expected total hospitalizations in Canada were approximately 162,000, a huge jump of 70% from the 95,000 reported hospitalization cases, according to the information provided on the dashboard.
Moriarty said that even with the reporting delays, the difference in hospitalizations, ICU admissions and deaths from Omicron alone is huge.
Can’t see the charts below? Click here
Moriarty said that outside of Quebec, the gap in reported and expected deaths has been growing during Omicron.
As with Omicron hospitalizations and deaths, variant ICU admissions are also being underestimated. ICU admissions are likely to be 29 percent higher than reported: 22,200 ICU admissions are expected compared to 14,750 reported, according to data analysis by COVID-19 Resources Canada.
53 PERCENT OF CANADIANS INFECTED WITH OMICRON – ESTIMATES
According to Moriarty’s estimates, 53 percent of all Canadians have been infected with Omicron since December 2021, which is equivalent to 20.3 million people.
A breakdown by age shows that about 59 percent of those infected are under the age of 40.
The data shows that per capita infections remained high in Atlantic Canada compared to most other regions from mid-February onward. While cases in Canada are declining, the total estimated Omicron infections per capita has been the highest for Nova Scotia.
Nova Scotia also has the highest risk index, while the rest of the country has a high or high rating. the danger index designed by COVID-19 Resources Canada is measured by four equally weighted scores: vaccine protection, current infection and spread, impact on the health care system, and mortality.
As of early January of this year, Nova Scotia was at high threat risk, while most provinces were in the severe category of the index. But now the picture is reversed.
Test positivity rates estimated infections and sewage are high in Nova Scotia, while other provinces are low. Moriarty says part of the reason is that the percentage of Nova Scotians infected was low for several months in 2022 and even last December.
“They certainly kept up some public health measures, like wearing masks, for example, and they had a very proactive public health system,” Moriarty said. “One great thing was that Nova Scotia was testing much more per capita than any other province until recently.”
Now, without public health measures, the province has the highest danger index.
The surge in hospitalizations and deaths began to occur as Nova Scotia began testing as small as the rest of the country. Another reason, Moriarty said, is that they have so many more people who hadn’t been infected before, so cases started to rise.
OMICRON INCREASING HOSPITALIZATION COSTS
The dashboard also looks at the rising costs associated with Omicron hospitalizations and compares them to non-COVID related hospitalization costs.
Based on the analysis, COVID-19 Resources Canada reduced the COVID-19 estimated by CIHI hospitalization costs by 27 percent, to account for Omicron’s shorter average length of stay.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) show that the average cost of a hospital stay for COVID-19 is $23,000, about 3 times more than for a heart attack ($7,000) or pneumonia ($8,000), four times more than the cost of a stay for influenza (approximately $5,000) and almost as much as a kidney transplant ($27,000).
People with COVID-19 stayed in the hospital about twice as long as an average patient with pneumonia, about 15 days compared with seven days with pneumonia, and a higher proportion of them were admitted to the ICU and ventilated, according to the results. CIHI data. .