It’s official: 2022 is the deadliest year of COVID-19, so far.
With Canada well on its way to reaching five million total cases and 50,000 deaths in 2023, the end of the pandemic remains out of sight.
As of December 23, there have been a reported 48,948 COVID-19-related deaths across Canada. They make up just a fraction of the 4,475,268 reported cases in the country since the pandemic began nearly three years ago.
The underreporting of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, deaths and vaccinations has worsened as governments pulled back from daily reporting to weekly, and some to monthly releases. Data on gender, age and race has also been largely absent from government reporting.
Just look at New Brunswick, where health officials recently released a review of COVID-19 death data, concluding an additional 86 deaths — more than ten per cent of total deaths related to COVID-19 — were previously unreported.
But just because politicians are pretending the pandemic is over doesn’t mean scientists are doing the same.
Beginning to understand long-COVID
Earlier this month, Canada’s chief science adviser issued a series of recommendations as a blueprint to help the federal government combat cases of long-COVID, or post-COVID condition (PCC).
In a recent news release, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam noted that “PCC represents a significant health issue in our country,” adding more data and research is necessary to understand long-term physical and psycho-social impacts of long-COVID.
The first look into the federal government’s insights regarding long-COVID started with a simple, yet crucial step: admitting the disease even exists.
The task force was established in July in an effort to better understand long-COVID.
According to their findings, as of August, nearly 15 per cent of adults who have had COVID-19 experienced symptoms three months or more after initially testing positive.
The task force found that symptoms of long-COVID can range from muscle pain, brain fog and trouble breathing, to extreme fatigue, gastrointestinal problems and heart palpitations.
“To start, we need to acknowledge that PCC is real,” Nemer said Wednesday. “That COVID-19 manifests itself as an acute but also as a chronic illness.”
Despite the effects of long-COVID becoming clearer, there is no consensus on the definition of the condition or how to diagnose and treat it.
“This is where we need a lot of research to understand what was going on, and we also need perhaps to try and see if any of the existing treatments for other diseases can be repurposed,” Nemer added.
Among the 18 recommendations issued by the task force are strategies to identify and treat patients, track their symptoms, research the condition and prevent infections.
With so little understanding, Nemer made one thing clear: getting vaccinated against COVID-19 can reduce the risk of developing long-COVID symptoms.
According to Canadian Institutes for Health Research president Dr. Michael Strong, there are three main factors that experts believe lead to long-COVID.
These factors begin with damage done by the initial infection to the heart, lungs or other organs that can cause long-term or even life-long effects.
How the immune system responds to the initial reaction and whether that response can continue after recovering from the virus is also a factor, along with long-term impacts from COVID-19 itself.
“We don’t know why women are twice as likely as men to contract it. We don’t know why it can accelerate the onset of other chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease,” Nemer said. “But it is evident that [post-COVID-19 condition] is a serious condition that can have at times irreversible health consequences.”
The impact of Omicron
Earlier this month, Statistics Canada published a Canadian COVID-19 Antibody and Health Survey in an effort to better understand the spread and long-term impacts of the virus.
First discovered one year ago, the Omicron variant quickly became the dominant strain of COVID-19. But as Omicron cases spread across the country, the rise of rapid antigen tests and self-reporting of COVID-19 diagnoses, the ability to accurately track the number of actual cases at any given time in 2022. Reported numbers don’t include those who got COVID-19 but didn’t test or weren’t aware they had it due to being asymptomatic.
The results of StatsCan’s survey, conducted between May 10 and August 31, found that, on average, at least one in every 50 Canadians aged 18 and older would have tested positive for COVID-19 on any given day. In total, between 420,000 and 650,000 Canadian adults suffered from COVID-19 infections each day during the study period.
More than one-third of those cases were individuals who weren’t aware they contracted the virus. During that time, the vast majority of Canadians used rapid antigen testing (74 per cent) compared to 26 per cent from a PCR test to determine their COVID-19 status.
Nurses’ Voices
Earlier this year, the Canadian Federation of Nurses Union published Nurses’ Voices: Stories of Courage in the Face of COVID-19. The book featured over two dozen profiles of frontline nurses from across Canada, written by myself and fellow rabble.ca contributor Matthew Behrens.
The collection of stories pulled back the curtain on the sacrifices made by Canadian health-care workers. Whether it was isolating from families, pushing off retirement, or witnessing the deaths of people alone without loved ones, the toll the early waves of the pandemic took on frontline workers was immeasurable.
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