The World Health Organization has ended the global COVID-19 emergency, citing increased immunity, fewer deaths and less pressure on hospitals. But while the situation with the virus has improved worldwide, it has also exposed major issues with Canada’s health-care system.
Canadian experts said Friday that regardless of WHO’s decision, COVID will remain a challenge to public health for years to come and has left lasting scars on the health-care system.
Dr. Bonnie Henry, British Columbia’s provincial health officer and chair of the Council of Chief Medical Officers of Health, told CBC News that while the emergency phase of the pandemic is ending, COVID shed light on problems in long-term care and hospitals that need to be addressed.
“We have to pay attention to ensuring that we have that surge capacity in our health-care system,” she said, adding that COVID also exposed “basic societal inequities” around pay and staffing in the system.
“This is another virus that is in our communities, it’s going to be with us for a period of time and it adds to that baseline number of people that are going to require hospital care periodically in our community,” Henry said. “So we need to add that on top of, and not go back to, the very stretched system we had before.”
The pandemic, which was first declared an international crisis by WHO, the United Nations’ health agency, on Jan. 30, 2020, resulted in unprecedented lockdowns, economic upheaval and the deaths of at least seven million people worldwide and more than 52,000 people in Canada.
But the death toll is likely much higher than reported, and WHO estimates it could be more than 20 million globally.
“It’s with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday. “That does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat.”
Following WHO’s declaration, the Public Health Agency of Canada said in a statement that it will “continue its work with provinces and territories to implement a long-term, sustainable approach to the ongoing management of COVID-19.”
WHO says COVID-19 is no longer a global health emergency
World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says population immunity has increased from vaccination and infection, and the pressure on health systems from COVID-19 has eased.
Lessons for a fragile health-care system
COVID hospitalizations still remain stubbornly high in Canada, with 2,881 hospital beds occupied by COVID patients across the country, according to the latest federal data, despite continuing to decline since the beginning of the year. But the numbers are a far cry from where they once were.
“We had some very, very challenging times with COVID,” said Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases physician at Toronto General Hospital, recalling instances where adults had to be treated in pediatric wards and authorities built tents outside ERs to treat the overflow of patients in the spring of 2021.
He said that WHO’s declaration should be treated as an opportunity to reflect on the country’s flawed health-care system and how it can be improved going forward.
In many parts of the country, emergency rooms remain under immense strain despite the decline in COVID hospitalizations.
“It’s a patchwork of many different systems that don’t necessarily fit well together,” Bogoch said.
“Many people working in health care would have told you this years before the pandemic, but it was exposed during the pandemic.”
Dr. Prabhat Jha, a professor of global health epidemiology at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, said the global reality is that we now have stronger population immunity from a combination of infection and vaccination — but the crisis isn’t over.
“We still have incredible challenges when it comes to our health-care system, particularly when it comes to primary health,” he said, adding that vaccination infrastructure needs to be maintained in Canada for COVID and other viruses to prevent a further burden on hospitals.
“What is needed is to strengthen public health systems, strengthen the surveillance, the ability to get out rapid tests and vaccination. In peacetime, you don’t let the entire infrastructure erode.”
More than 77 per cent of Canadian adults and close to 90 per cent of young adults (aged 17 to 24) are estimated to have previously had the disease as of mid-January, according to national blood donor data from the federal government’s COVID-19 Immunity Task Force.
Those high levels of infection, combined with the more than 83 per cent of Canadians who’ve received at least two doses of a COVID vaccine, better treatment access and less severe infections than previous strains, have led to stronger immune protection against a virus that continues to spread globally.
But only about two thirds of Canadians over the age of 60 have been previously infected, and fewer than 20 per cent have received a shot in the past few months, meaning there is still a significant part of the population vulnerable to infection and hospitalization.
Past and future challenges
Experts have warned that the pandemic’s ongoing burden on the health-care system will be felt for years to come, with long COVID affecting a subset of those infected, and delays for cancer screenings and surgeries causing massive backlogs in Canada’s system.
Dawn Bowdish, an associate professor at McMaster University in Hamilton and a Canada Research Chair in Aging and Immunity, said maintaining vaccination rates, particularly among more vulnerable populations, will be crucial going forward.
Dr. Bonnie Henry, British Columbia’s provincial health officer, shown last year, says WHO’s pronouncement is an emotional reminder of how challenging the last three years have been for Canadians. (Ben Nelms/CBC)
“COVID is still worse than the flu,” Bowdish said. “COVID is in now the top three causes of death and will probably persist — and that means just like the flu will have surges where health-care capacity is at its maximum and there will be compromises for other treatments.”
B.C.’s Dr. Bonnie Henry said that while the end of the emergency phase of the pandemic wasn’t unexpected, it’s an emotional reminder of how challenging the last three years have been for Canadians.
“Adversity introduces us to ourselves, and I think across this country, across this province, people have been generous and kind and resourceful, and brave,” Henry said, adding that Canadians stepped up to get vaccinated across the country when it mattered most.
“Let’s use this as another opportunity to move forward with coming together and not being polarized, not trying to make this an issue. Let’s remember the things that we learned through this about how we can support each other.”
Nova Scotia RCMP say their investigation into two suspicious deaths earlier this month has concluded that one man died by homicide and the other by suicide.
The bodies of two men, aged 40 and 73, were found in a home in Windsor, N.S., on Sept. 3.
Police say the province’s medical examiner determined the 40-year-old man was killed and the 73-year-old man killed himself.
They say the two men were members of the same family.
No arrests or charges are anticipated, and the names of the deceased will not be released.
RCMP say they will not be releasing any further details out of respect for the family.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
For the first time in their history, members of the Cree community of Nemaska received a visit from a sitting Quebec premier on Sunday and were able to share first-hand the story of how they were displaced by a hydroelectric project in the 1970s.
François Legault was greeted in Nemaska by men and women who arrived by canoe to re-enact the founding of their new village in the Eeyou Istchee James Bay region, in northern Quebec, 47 years ago. The community was forced in the early 1970s to move from its original location because members were told it would be flooded as part of the Nottaway-Broadback-Rupert hydro project.
The reservoir was ultimately constructed elsewhere, but by then the members of the village had already left for other places, abandoning their homes and many of their belongings in the process.
George Wapachee, co-author of the book “Going Home,” said community members were “relocated for nothing.”
“We didn’t know what the rights were, or who to turn to,” he said in an interview. “That turned us into refugees and we were forced to abandon the life we knew.”
Nemaska’s story illustrates the challenges Legault’s government faces as it looks to build new dams to meet the province’s power needs, which are anticipated to double by 2050. Legault has promised that any new projects will be developed in partnership with Indigenous people and have “social acceptability,” but experts say that’s easier said than done.
François Bouffard, an associate professor of electrical engineering at McGill University, said the earlier era of hydro projects were developed without any consideration for the Indigenous inhabitants living nearby.
“We live in a much different world now,” he said. “Any kind of hydro development, no matter where in Quebec, will require true consent and partnership from Indigenous communities.” Those groups likely want to be treated as stakeholders, he added.
Securing wider social acceptability for projects that significantly change the landscape — as hydro dams often do — is also “a big ask,” he said. The government, Bouchard added, will likely focus on boosting capacity in its existing dams, or building installations that run off river flow and don’t require flooding large swaths of land to create reservoirs.
Louis Beaumier, executive director of the Trottier Energy Institute at Polytechnique Montreal, said Legault’s visit to Nemaska represents a desire for reconciliation with Indigenous people who were traumatized by the way earlier projects were carried about.
Any new projects will need the consent of local First Nations, Beaumier said, adding that its easier to get their blessing for wind power projects compared to dams, because they’re less destructive to the environment and easier around which to structure a partnership agreement.
Beaumier added that he believes it will be nearly impossible to get the public — Indigenous or not — to agree to “the destruction of a river” for a new dam, noting that in recent decades people have come to recognize rivers as the “unique, irreplaceable riches” that they are.
Legault’s visit to northern Quebec came on Sept. 15, when the community gathers every year to remember the founding of the “New Nemaska,” on the shores of Lake Champion in the heart of the boreal forest, some 1,500 kilometres from Montreal. Nemaska Chief Clarence Jolly said the community invited Legault to a traditional feast on Sunday, and planned to present him with Wapachee’s book and tell him their stories.
The book, published in 2022 along with Susan Marshall, is filled with stories of Nemaska community members. Leaving behind sewing machines and hunting dogs, they were initially sent to two different villages, Wapachee said.
In their new homes, several of them were forced to live in “deplorable conditions,” and some were physically and verbally abused, he said. The new village of Nemaska was only built a few years later, in 1977.
“At this time, families were losing their children to prison-schools,” he said, in reference to the residential school system. “Imagine the burden of losing your community as well.”
Thomas Jolly, a former chief, said he was 15 years old when he was forced to leave his village with all his belongings in a single bag.
Meeting Legault was important “because have to recognize what happened and we have to talk about the repercussions that the relocation had on people,” he said, adding that those effects are still felt today.
Earlier Sunday, Legault was in the Cree community of Eastmain, where he participated in the official renaming of a hydro complex in honour of former premier Bernard Landry. At the event, Legault said he would follow the example of his late predecessor, who oversaw the signing of the historic “Paix des Braves” agreement between the Quebec government and the Cree in 2002.
He said there is “significant potential” in Eeyou Istchee James Bay, both in increasing the capacity of its large dams and in developing wind power projects.
“Obviously, we will do that with the Cree,” he said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
NEMASKA – For the first time in their history, members of the Cree community of Nemaska received a visit from a sitting Quebec premier on Sunday and were able to share first-hand the story of how they were displaced by a hydroelectric project in the 1970s.
François Legault was greeted in Nemaska by men and women who arrived by canoe to re-enact the founding of their new village in the Eeyou Istchee James Bay region, in northern Quebec, 47 years ago. The community was forced in the early 1970s to move from their original location because they were told it would be flooded as part of the Nottaway-Broadback-Rupert hydro project.
The reservoir was ultimately constructed elsewhere, but by then the members of the village had already left for other places, abandoning their homes and many of their belongings in the process.
George Wapachee, co-author of the book “Going Home,” said community members were “relocated for nothing.”
“We didn’t know what the rights were, or who to turn to,” he said in an interview. “That turned us into refugees and we were forced to abandon the life we knew.”
The book, published in 2022 by Wapachee and Susan Marshall, is filled with stories of Cree community members. Leaving behind sewing machines and hunting dogs, they were initially sent to two different villages, 100 and 300 kilometres away, Wapachee said.
In their new homes, several of them were forced to live in “deplorable conditions,” and some were physically and verbally abused, he said. The new village of Nemaska was only built a few years later, in 1977.
“At this time, families were losing their children to prison-schools,” he said, in reference to the residential school system. “Imagine the burden of losing your community as well.”
Legault’s visit came on Sept. 15, when the community gathers every year to remember the founding of the “New Nemaska,” on the shores of Lake Champion in the heart of the boreal forest, some 1,500 kilometres from Montreal. Nemaska Chief Clarence Jolly said the community invited Legault to a traditional feast on Sunday, and planned to present him with Wapachee’s book and tell him their stories.
Thomas Jolly, a former chief, said he was 15 years old when he was forced to leave his village with all his belongings in a single bag.
Meeting Legault was important “because have to recognize what happened and we have to talk about the repercussions that the relocation had on people,” he said, adding that those effects are still felt today.
Earlier Sunday, Legault had been in the Cree community of Eastmain, where he participated in the official renaming of a hydro dam in honour of former premier Bernard Landry.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
