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Outbreaks in long-term care and retirement homes across Canada account for the majority of the country’s COVID-related deaths and represent one of the largest gaps to emerge in its response to the pandemic.
“I think that’s the main lesson to be learned from this pandemic,” said Saverio Stranges, chair of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at Western University’s Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry. “We can’t ignore the need for investment in those settings.”
About 80 per cent of Canada’s first wave COVID-19 deaths are linked to outbreaks in long-term care settings. It’s the highest percentage among 16 comparable countries, according to a study Stranges and two Western colleagues cite in an article published in the American Journal of Public Health, which explores how lessons from the 2003 SARS pandemic inform Canada’s response to COVID-19.
“Canada’s learned a great deal from SARS in terms of public health infrastructure,” he said. “But because SARS did not really hit long-term care facilities . . . I think COVID-19 has really revealed the vulnerabilities within those settings, which have been historically underfunded . . . not just in Canada, but I would say in many Western countries.”
As of Monday, there were 160 active outbreaks in the province’s long-term care and retirement homes, where 989 have been reported since the onset of the pandemic, Public Health Ontario says.
Of the province’s 3,505 COVID-19 deaths, including 19 Monday, 3,350 were people over the age of 60, a demographic experts warn is at higher risk of severe consequences of the virus if they are infected.
That isn’t likely to change during the second wave, Stranges said, which begs the question whether officials should have provided more protection to long-term care facilities prior to the current surge in cases.
“The same happened in Europe,” he said. “People wonder, should governments have made major improvements between the first and the second wave? Realistically, you can’t really change things dramatically in a manner of a few months, and that’s the sad reality.”
