09/01/2024
Tara Moriarty writes:
The two main takeaways from this graph are the following:
1) Provinces are only reporting a small fraction of actual COVID-19 deaths on the most accessible and widely accessed public reporting pages.
Overall, fewer than 20% of COVID-19 deaths are being reported in these public places in all provinces (a bit higher in Quebec in fall/winter season, but not much).
2) The model and waste water and the Forecast score are good at predicting excess mortality and COVID-19 deaths.
Over time, as more reporting comes in via various sources, the purple dashed line and pink line typically catch up to the prediction (although not completely for the purple dashed line, because some deaths are likely missed since testing has declined dramatically).
There's always more wobble in more recent months, before slow-reported data come in that help us re-calibrate assumptions about under-reporting rates.
But it's generally fairly stable.
So....
When we say the score is 20 and the Forecast word score is SEVERE, this means about 1,100 people in Canada are dying untimely (excess) deaths each week.
This is about 20X more deaths than we'd expect from influenza.
At a score of 20, COVID-19 is likely the number 1 or 2 cause of death in the country that week.
That seems pretty severe to us, although word choice can be value-laden, and if it's severe for months on end, which it often is from now to the end of December, then the value of that word score may be diminished.
It's a bit like discussions of climate change, as we break more and more historic records.
How do we talk about this without people tuning out, but also being accurate in our description?
It's a major problem, and one that is cynically politicized by those with incentives not to act or respond when collective action is needed.
Provinces have really got themselves into a bind by the impressive scale of under-testing and under-reporting.
As you can see from p. 26 of our biweekly report, ~1,500 people/day are likely being hospitalized with COVID-19 this week in Canada (10,500 this week).
Canada is likely spending $37.4M/day on COVID-19 hospitalizations this week (based on CIHI cost estimates).
Canadian hospitals are likely 18% over-capacity this week due to hospitalizations of people with COVID-19 (whether these are detected by testing or not).
These estimates are based on the most recent hospitalization rates per death reported by France, which reports the greatest proportion of its COVID-19 hospitalizations of G7 countries.
And no, they're unlikely to be incidental "with" COVID-19 hospitalizations.
The mortality rate per hospitalization in France is still two times higher than the average in-hospital mortality rate for all diseases/conditions.
