Indian envoy warns of 'big red line,' days after charges laid in Nijjar case
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
With provinces releasing less frequent data on COVID-19 three years into the pandemic, a group of volunteer experts has been releasing their own analysis of cases, highlighting a vast underreporting of hospitalizations and deaths in Canada due to the Omicron variant.
Recent figures based on this analysis show that expected hospitalizations from Omicron could be 70 per cent higher on average than what has been reported since Dec. 2, 2021, if the rest of the country reported as Quebec did.
"If each province reported in a similar fashion as Quebec, which is the gold standard in Canada for complete and timely reporting of severe COVID outcomes, then these numbers would look very different from those that have been reported," Tara Moriarty, an infectious disease expert at the University of Toronto and the co-founder of COVID-19 Resources Canada, told CTVNews.ca on Tuesday.
The difference is also significant for Omicron deaths, which are expected to be 51 per cent higher than reported, according to the data.
"It became critical to provide this information to the public," said Moriarty.
Founded in March 2020, the grassroots initiative – made up of scientists, healthcare professionals, and web developers – collates data from different sources including information from provincial databases and Statistics Canada, and gets its funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Since Dec. 2, 2021, the total expected hospitalizations from Omicron in Canada were roughly 162,000 - a huge jump of 70 per cent from the reported 95,000 hospitalization cases, according to the information provided on the dashboard.
Moriarty said even with reporting delays, the difference in hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and deaths from Omicron alone is huge.
Can't see the graphs below? Click here
Expected deaths from Omicron are 51 per cent higher than what has been reported. An earlier report by the 2021 Royal Society of Canada—in which Moriarty was involved– showed that on average, provinces outside Quebec likely under-reported COVID deaths by 1.4 fold, and that the country as a whole underreported by 1.3 fold.
Moriarty said outside of Quebec, the gap in reported and expected deaths has been growing during Omicron.
As in hospitalizations and deaths from Omicron, ICU admissions from the variant are also being underreported. ICU admissions are most likely 29 per cent higher than what is being reported— an expected 22,200 ICU admissions in comparison to 14,750 reported ones, according to the data analysis by COVID-19 Resources Canada.
According to Moriarty’s estimates, 53 per cent of all Canadians have been infected with Omicron since December 2021, equaling 20.3 million people.
A breakdown by age shows that an estimated 59 per cent of those infected are below the age of 40.
Data shows that per capita infections remained high in Atlantic Canada compared with most other regions from mid-February onward. While cases across Canada are coming down, the total estimated Omicron infections per capita have been the highest for Nova Scotia.
Nova Scotia also has the highest hazard index while the rest of the country is either rated elevated or high. The hazard index designed by COVID-19 Resources Canada is measured by four equally weighted scores: vaccine protection, current infection and spread, healthcare system impact, and mortality.
In early January of this year, Nova Scotia had a high hazard risk while most provinces were under the severe category of the index. But the picture is reversed now.
The test positivity rates estimated infections and wastewater is high in Nova Scotia while they’re down in other provinces. Moriarty says part of the reason is that the percentage of Nova Scotians infected was low for several months of 2022 and even last December.
"They certainly kept up some public health measures, like masking for example, and had a very proactive public health system," Moriarty said. "One big thing was that Nova Scotia was testing a lot more per capita than any other province until recently."
Now with public health measures gone, the province has the highest hazard index.
The surge in hospitalizations, and deaths started happening when Nova Scotia started testing as little as the rest of the country. Another reason, Moriarty said, is that they have a lot more people who hadn’t been infected before so the cases started seeing an uptick.
The dashboard also analyzes the rising costs associated with Omicron hospitalizations and compares them with the non-COVID hospitalization costs.
Based on the analysis, COVID-19 Resources Canada reduced the CIHI-estimated COVID-19 hospitalization costs by 27 per cent, to account for the shorter average duration of hospitalizations from Omicron.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) estimates show that the average cost of a COVID-19 hospital stay 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 remained in the hospital for about twice as long as an average pneumonia patient—roughly 15 days in comparison to seven days from pneumonia— and a larger proportion of them were admitted to the ICU and ventilated, according to the CIHI data.
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
The U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah against the wishes of the U.S.
Footage from dozens of security cameras in the area of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion could be the key to identifying the suspect responsible for shooting and seriously injuring a security guard outside the rapper’s sprawling home early Tuesday morning, a former Toronto homicide detective says.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
Susan Buckner, best known for playing peppy Rydell High School cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1978 classic movie musical 'Grease,' has died. She was 72.
Accused killer Jeremy Skibicki could have a challenging time convincing a judge that he is not criminally responsible for the deaths of four Indigenous women, a legal analyst says.
A Calgary bylaw requiring businesses to charge a minimum bag fee and only provide single-use items when requested has officially been tossed.
Two Nova Scotia men are dead after a boat they were travelling in sank in the Annapolis River in Granville Centre, N.S., on Monday.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.