Five COVID-19 Myths and What Ontario’s Numbers are Telling Us
In Canada, we’re now into our second calendar year of battling COVID-19. Vaccines have been created, tested, and delivered and are now (slowly) being administered. While some are hopeful mass vaccination will be in place by the summer, delays should be expected. It may be Christmas before we can comfortably celebrate holidays together again.
That makes our approach to curbing the spread of the virus in the meantime all the more important. To do that, we need to learn from what has worked and what hasn’t since the virus first reached Canada nearly one year ago. Our biggest challenge in doing so will be combatting the myths, garbled government messages, and growing public fatigue with both that are each as dangerous as the virus itself.
You’ve probably heard some of these myths before:
· Myth #1: In 2021, the virus is on the decline.
· Myth #2: Schools and childcare centres are safe from COVID outbreaks.
· Myth #3: Workplaces are safe from COVID outbreaks.
· Myth #4: Long-term care homes have been protected from the second wave.
· Myth #5: Outgoing young people are the main culprit in viral spread.
So, let’s dig into them.
Myth #1: The virus is on the decline.
The virus exploded across Ontario in the spring of 2020 and the government responded by shutting down schools, workplaces, and most non-essential businesses. As Canada Day approached and lockdowns began to lift, over 33,000 Ontarians had been infected and over 2,600 had died.
Over the summer, infections and deaths decreased dramatically. This was likely because of increasingly widespread mask usage, physical distancing in well-ventilated outdoor settings, and modifications made to the retail shopping experience. Under 10% of total infections and 4% of deaths occurred in the period from July to September.
But as the fall and winter revved back up and Ontarians returned to indoor settings for social gatherings, schools reopened, and workers began to return to workplaces, the numbers spiked again. In fact, 71% of all COVID-19 infections in 2020 took place in the final quarter of the year — a quarter that also delivered 38% of all COVID deaths.
The numbers grow starker when you isolate December from the rest of the quarter. Over just 31 days in the final month of the year, over 66,000 Ontarians tested positive for COVID-19 and a total of 908 people died from the virus that month alone. Those numbers may or may not sound large but consider their share of total numbers in 2020: they represent over 36% of total infections and 20% of deaths. That’s nearly one in three people who tested positive and one in five people who died after becoming infected in December alone.
Myth #2: Schools and childcare centres are safe from COVID outbreaks.
Early on in the pandemic, many people thought that the virus was only of real risk to people over 65 and that children were unlikely sources of virus spread. Of course, students in schools across Ontario left the classroom for March break just as the virus was getting started, and they did not return back to the classroom until September.
By the end of March, after kids had been removed from class, Ontario had recorded under 2,000 cases of COVID-19 and had, at that point, only lost 32 lives. The cancellation of in-person classes throughout the spring likely helped depress the number of infections in children.
When kids returned first to child care centres in the summer and then to school settings in the fall, their infection rate began to creep up. Incidences in settings with younger children like elementary schools and joint elementary-secondary schools saw the highest rate of infection once in-person classes resumed. Infections in these settings reached their highest point in the weeks just before Christmas.
There are many reasons why elementary schools might be better incubators for infection: poor handwashing among young children, crowded classrooms settings, and poor ventilation in older buildings, to name just a few. But what we do know is that children can indeed become infected with COVID, that they are getting infected in their schools, and that they can pass it on to family members.
Myth #3: Workplaces are safe from COVID outbreaks.
Throughout the pandemic, there has been an enormous focus from government at all levels to get people back into workplaces across the country. They have provided big and small businesses alike with materials, funding, and advice needed to remain open or re-open as they are able.
Of course, not all workplaces are created equal and not all workplaces, even after COVID protocols have been introduced, carry the same risk level when it comes to returning to in-person work. Early in the pandemic, farms were ground-zero for workplace spread of the virus. As other workers began to return to workplaces in the fall, ‘other workplaces’ — those not related to farming, food processing, retail, or health services — began to see a spike in outbreaks.
By January 1, 2021, nearly a quarter of all workplace outbreaks had taken place on a farm, followed by 16% at food processing centres. Retail workplaces, which had spent some of the pandemic closed and other parts of it in modified service (such as curbside pick-up) was third at just 7%. Medical and health services workplaces had just 3% of outbreaks, while all other workplaces were responsible for the final 51% of workplace infections.
Myth #4: Long-term care homes have been protected from the second wave.
Despite outbreaks in other settings, long-term care homes remain the epicentre of the COVID disaster in Ontario. Cases first exploded in the spring, briefly settled down in the summer, and began to rise once more as the fall and winter took hold.
While the daily numbers have not spiked as high as in the spring, they have remained consistently high throughout the fall and winter. 36% of all COVID-19 infections in long-term care homes took place in November and December alone. 30% of Ontario’s 626 long-term care homes had an active outbreak of the virus as of January 1. And worst of all, one in four residents who have contracted the virus have now died.
Myth #5: Outgoing young people are the main culprit in viral spread.
Throughout the pandemic, much of the blame for the spread of the virus has been placed on young people that continue go out and have fun in public instead of hunkering down until vaccines are widely available. When we look the age breakdown of positive infections, young people in their twenties lead all other age group and represent 20.7% of infections.
However, 65% of all COVID-19 infections have occurred in people under 60, suggesting that being working age might have something to do with virus spread. Additionally, those in their thirties, forties, and fifties are not far off their twenty-something year-old peers as the infection rates for people of those age groups all hover between 14% and 15%. That’s less than 20%, but not by a substantial margin. Add in that younger workers are more likely to be working on the frontlines in both retail and medical settings and it stands to reason that not all young people are becoming infected because they are out at the bars.
The hard-partying young people argument also fails to acknowledge the data we do have about community spread in recreational settings that suggests it is actually fitness centres like gyms and yoga studios, as well as ‘other recreation’ settings like hair salons, that are leading the charge infections.
But compare these infection rates to other outbreak settings and suddenly the hard partying young people argument holds little water.
Here are several tables that lay out the difference. In each graph, recreational settings are represented by pink, green, yellow, and blue lines while the purple line represents a non-recreational setting for comparison.
Elementary School Infection Rate vs. All Recreation Types
Purple = Elementary Schools
All Others = Recreational Settings
Farm Infection Workplace Rate vs. All Recreation Types
Purple = Farms
All Others = Recreational Settings
Food Processing Workplace Infection Rate vs. All Recreation Types
Purple = Food processing workplaces
All Others = Recreational Settings
Retail Workplace Infection Rate vs. All Recreation Types
Purple = Retail workplaces
All Others = Recreational Settings
Medical and Health Services Workplace Infection Rate vs. All Recreation Types
Purple = Medical/health services
All Others = Recreational Settings
All Other Workplace Infection Rate vs. All Recreation Types
Purple = All other workplaces
All Others = Recreational Settings
There may very well be infections taking place in recreational centres that have not been captured by the Government of Ontario’s data. But the data that has been captured for both recreational settings and workplace settings suggest that with the exception of retail workplaces (where spread is about equal), and medical/health care services (where spread is less prevalent than in recreational centres), workplaces remain a bigger source of infection.
The Threat of COVID Will Continue in 2021
Until a significant majority of Ontarians are vaccinated, we will continue to see infections in recreational centres, educational settings, workplaces, and most frequently, long-term care homes.
To make sure the rate of infection is slowed as much as possible, and as few lives are lost as possible, politicians need to be honest about where the spread is occurring, equip citizens with clear advice about how to help curb the spread, and invest in the resources we need to control spread in hotspots like long-term care homes.
8,705 Ontarians died during the Spanish Flu. At 4,625 deaths already, Ontario is well on its way to surpassing that deadly tally. If just 12 people per day are taken by COVID-19 from now until New Year’s Eve, this pandemic will become the worst in our history. For context, deaths in long-term care homes in Ontario reached double digits on all but five days in December. Those homes alone could drag us over the line.
What’s clear is that this fight is nowhere near over and will become even more deadly in the weeks and months ahead.
