>> Jeyan: For most of the pandemic, daily case counts were the most widely tracked and
followed metric in the pandemic.
Then scale the OMICRON -- then came the OMICRON variant.
Justin Chandler covers the Hamilton-Niagara region for on our Ontario hubs and he joins us
now on how the analytics have had to evolve.
In light of the government's announcement this week what is the new policy for tracking
cases in schools?
>> Justin: The way it's going to work now is schools and child care centres are going to report
absences and then, when there's 30% of a group that is absent, that's going to trigger an alert
to public health when they can determine whether or not a school is going to be closed or
a child care centre and that's when parents will be notified.
It's no longer going to be someone in your child's class or daycare cohort or what have you
who's tested positive.
>> Jeyan: I was going to say are to the past two years every day I would wake up I would look at
the weather and the next thing I would look at is the case counts.
My mum called me the first thing she would ask me before she asked how I was doing she would
ask about the case counts.
Dr. but some are saying that those aren't a good indication of the virus circulating
anymore.
Why is that?
>> Justin: The consensus among public health experts and officials now is that we're
really under counting and just getting the tip of the iceberg with our testing and that's
because people can't get tested.
A good example is my house hold was isolating for five days last week because someone had COVID
symptoms and none of us were able to get tested because now only certain high risk workers
are able to go do that.
So a lot of people now are getting sick or getting symptoms.
And they're just unable to actually know whether or not they have COVID.
So that's not getting reported and adding to our provincial numbers.
>> Jeyan: Let's talk a little bit about that in general.
Apart from schools how is who can get it and who can't play into tracking OMICRON?
>> Justin: That is important.
Right now testing is restricted to people in these higher risk settings because they're
considered the ones most likely to get COVID and I guess the most essential.
So we can still take from those numbers hospitalization rates.
And Jeff Qwong said even though they may not be entirely accurate, we can still say COVID
positivity rates were closer to maybe 1% several weeks ago and now they're closer to 30% which
is what they were when we spoke.
Whether that number is 30 or 25 you can still see there is a big jump.
So the test positivity rate is still useful to at least some degree.
>> Jeyan: What's interesting is hospitals are being asked to distinguish who's admitted with
COVID as well as their primary element or from COVID alone.
What is gained from sort of knowing that difference?
>> Justin: So this has been sort of controversial.
My understanding from listening to different experts and from talking to Dr. QWONG is it can
be useful to know how many people are getting really sick from the virus versus how many
people are in hospital for something unrelated.
An example that gets tossed around a lot is a car accident but don't really have a severe
case of COVID.
Dr. QWONG said when this becomes difficult, is if someone has underlying conditions, you
might not know if that condition is being exacerbated by Covid-19.
Maybe they haven't have had to be there because of that or longer because of that.
It starts to get difficult.
I've also heard the counter argument that at least as far as where we are right now as long
as people are in hospital that's what matters.
And it doesn't matter why they're there.
Given that capacity is so overwhelmed.
>> Jeyan: What I found interesting is the conversation about ICU beds.
We have this conversation about surgeries being postponed.
Can you give us an explanation of how OMICRON plays into beds not being available or surgeries
not being done because of that?
>> Justin: For years and years as a lot of people know we've had problems with hospital
capacity in Ontario.
Right now, even though OMICRON is apparently causing fewer hospitalizations as a rate than
the delta variant would have, it's causing so many more that more people are ending up in
hospital and needing care.
And so what's happening is that people are going to the hospital.
They've got Covid-19.
That takes up spots that, perhaps, other people going to hospital might be able to use.
So hospitals are having to cut surgeries.
They're having to postpone other activities.
Move things further down the line, other operations and it just means there's so much COVID
in the hospitals right now.
So many people needing care that normal operations and the other things we need just to keep our
societies moving as normal -- whatever we say when we mean "normal" aren't happening.
>> Jeyan: All right.
I want to talk about some of the other tools that public health officials have in their tool
kits when it comes to tracking.
And it's this term.
Break it down for me: Syndromic surveillance.
That sounds really high-techy.
What does that actually mean?
>> Justin: So this was new to me when Dr. QWONG said it.
The way he explained it is you are tracking something using a related indicator.
The example he used is let's say you could track that pharmacies in the community were selling a
lot of anti diarrhoeal.
So the example he gave here is that we could use workplace absenteeism as a syndromic
surveillance for Covid-19.
You might not know that someone in a house hold has Covid-19.
But if you know that they're not showing up to work, then you could potentially make some
inferences there.
And he said this could be useful probably on a larger scale so you could say this community has
a lot of absenteeism as compared to this community.
And then that might lead you to think, okay, let's try to investigate why.
>> Jeyan: With all of these sort of tools at our disposal, you know, there are predictions that
sooner or later, all of us will get OMICRON.
So what's the value in making more precise evaluations between COVID and what might be a
regular cold or winter virus?
>> Justin: There are a couple of things here.
I asked Dr. QWONG for his take on the question and one of the things he said is it's more
serious.
As long as people are ending up in hospital, dying, getting long COVID, having symptoms that last
a long time as opposed to these other things we really do need to know the impact.
And we need to be able try to predict the impact.
I would also say as a Prier spec Tiff as a journalist, it's just important to any what's
happening so in the future we can refer do to it.
Was it worth it to take the steps we did and will we be ready for the next pandemic?
>> Jeyan: Justin, thank you very much for this update.