At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, retired teacher Lois Armstrong said local health workers in Kingston, OD, provided daily updates on cases, cases and deaths in the community. Now, Armstrong, 68, said the public is being called upon to play a greater role in risk management, but that information from health authorities is less than before. Data such as the location of the outbreaks, meanwhile, are no longer made public, he added. “I think it is very difficult for the average person to assess their own risk,” Armstrong said in an interview Monday. “Kingston is one of the hot spots in Ontario, but it still publishes the information only three times a week and you can not go for exams unless you are really high risk or really sick. So there is no way to find out. “ Health experts agree with Armstrong. Provincial governments are telling Canadians to assess their own sense of risk, but these same governments are reducing the amount of data available to residents, they say. “There is no doubt that less data is being provided to humans,” said Tara Moriarty, a professor at the University of Toronto School of Dentistry who studies infectious diseases. “It’s very critical because people are responsible for the way they handle the pandemic and the decisions they make.” Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador are the only provinces to report daily COVID-19 data, she said in an interview Monday, adding that Canada does fewer COVID-19 tests per capita than other rich countries. For the week ended April 9, an average of 1.46 COVID-19 tests per 1,000 people were performed daily in Canada, according to Our World In Data, a global data site affiliated with the University of Oxford. In Austria, by contrast, 40.5 tests per 1,000 people were performed. In Greece, Italy, the United Kingdom, France and South Korea, three times more daily per capita tests were performed than in Canada. The site counts the results of published PCR and antigen tests. While sewage testing has become a way of monitoring pandemic evolution, Moriarty said, it is only done in large cities in some provinces. It is not just a matter of data, he said, but also of communication. Government leaders, he explained, need to do a better job of communicating what the current situation is and who may be most at risk. read more Do you have an opinion? Send it to [email protected]
