If you remember the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, and you surely do, then you will recall the high degree to which every level of government was in our faces.
Ottawa imposed testing requirements, vaccine mandates and outright bans on domestic and foreign travel. The provinces brought in lockdowns, shuttered non-essential businesses, banned outside visitors in long-term care homes and closed schools; some even closed their provincial boundaries and enforced curfews. Cities closed parks and playgrounds, and required vaccine screening at indoor venues such as bars and restaurants when the lockdowns were eased.
As well, throughout much of the pandemic, politicians and public health officials gave regular briefings, sometimes on a daily basis. Their presence was like the emergency measures designed to fight the novel coronavirus – inescapable.
And now? Ever since the welcome day in May of this year when the World Health Organization declared that the pandemic no longer constitutes a “public health emergency of international concern,” those same government officials have gone awfully quiet.
A person can search online for new stories about COVID-19 in Canada and find mention of familiar names, such as Theresa Tam, the head of the Public Health Agency of Canada. And you can still go online and see federal and provincial data about vaccination and case rates, although they are not as complete as they once were.
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But there is no unified government message on the current state the pandemic coming from the officials who were once so present in our lives, and that’s disconcerting. Is it really possible that we went from apocalypse to afterthought in the space of a few months?
If so, that seems counterintuitive, because the most recent information that has trickled off of government websites and into the news points to a fall resurgence of COVID-19.
The number of cases and hospitalizations has been creeping up steadily since August started. So have test positivity rates, which more than doubled from 5.7 per cent nationally as of July 8 to 13.4 per cent as of Sept. 6.
Thankfully, a chief indicator of severity – the number of patients in intensive care – remains low. But there are other concerning numbers, this time around vaccinations.
The protection provided by the mRNA vaccines that were so critical to slowing the pandemic is known to wane after six months. While this is less of a concern for healthy younger people, it’s a big deal for older ones and those who are pregnant or immunocompromised.
And yet they aren’t keeping up to date on their vaccines. The cumulative proportion of people in Canada who received a second shot or a booster in the past six months was 5.7 per cent as of June 18 – barely one in 17 people.
The numbers are especially troubling for older, more vulnerable people: just 11.1 per cent for those in their 60s, 18.3 per cent for those in their 70s, and 21.9 per cent for those over 80.
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People need boosters, but they aren’t getting them. This is in spite of the fact that the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) said in the fall of 2022, the spring of 2023 and now again this fall, that those who are most vulnerable should get a booster after six months. This is especially true of anyone in that category who has been vaccinated but has never been infected by COVID-19 and doesn’t benefit from what is called hybrid immunity.
So where is the urgency from government officials? Why is there no alarm being raised about booster rates? Why is it that people who once imposed onerous, but necessary and defensible, restrictions on Canadians’ lives are now failing to provide equally muscular messaging on this next phase of the pandemic?
Canadians should not have to seek out news articles and access government websites to figure out whether they or their loved ones should get a COVID-19 booster. There should be clear and consistent messaging from Ottawa and the provinces about where we are now, what needs to be done, and where we’re headed.
Absent that, the message Canadians are receiving is that what is still officially a pandemic is somehow over in their country, and that COVID-19 is now a disease like any other that we manage on our own, such as the flu or the common cold. If that’s the opinion of our public officials, then all they have to do is let us know so we can get on with our lives.