Health
A year after Canada's 1st COVID-19 fatality, health officials reflect on pandemic death toll – CBC.ca
B.C.’s top doctor says the day the first British Columbian died of COVID-19 marked a turning point in her outlook on the pandemic.
“When I look back [on] that day, it really was a sense of dread,” said Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry. “Knowing that this was going to be a hard and emotional year.”
In a press conference on March 9, 2020, Henry was visibly shaken as she announced that a man in his 80s who lived at the Lynn Valley Care Centre in North Vancouver had died after contracting COVID-19. His death marked Canada’s first fatality from the virus.
Twenty more residents at the home would eventually die after contracting the illness.
“It became very apparent that for elderly people it could cause very minimal symptoms, but lead to death very quickly,” Henry said.
Since last March, 1,391 British Columbians have lost their lives to the virus. More than two thirds of deaths have been in seniors 80 years and above, mostly in care facilities.
Deaths multiply in long-term care
Garry Monckton was one of the earliest victims of COVID-19 on April 2. The 77-year-old was infected at the Haro Park care centre in Vancouver’s West End where he was a resident.
“We saw each other for the last time on March 14,” his daughter Samantha Monckton recalled. “I had heard, in the hallways, of COVID being in North Vancouver but it hadn’t come to the West End yet, but it was like a prediction of what was to come.”
Monckton says her father was the 31st person to die in B.C. “It was very alarming at the time, knowing that we had reached 31 people.”
Learning about new deaths hasn’t become any easier, said Henry. The once daily, and now biweekly, press conferences held by Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix are always marked by the health officials’ condolences to the new victims of the virus.
“People tell me that they appreciate that I recognize the importance of their loved ones,” said Henry. “I do feel every single one of them and I’ve reached out and connected to many of the families.”
“That moment, every day [when we learn that people have passed away] is the most difficult piece of news we get every day,” said Dix.
Henry had been responding to the COVID-19 situation since late December 2019 when details began to emerge about the virus spreading in China.
She says it brought up the fear and dread she’d experienced during the 2004 SARS outbreak in Toronto.
“I think many people, maybe early on, thought I was overreacting but that was part of my experiences.”
Henry says she resisted pressure from the media early on to present modelling of the province’s potential death rate because she believed it would give the impression that any deaths were acceptable.
Pandemic response had consequences
One of the earliest measures Henry and Dix implemented to prevent infections and deaths among vulnerable seniors was to restrict visits to long-term care homes.
The minister says they were conscious of the unintended consequences of that order on seniors’ lives.
“In many cases they don’t have long to live, and telling them they can’t have visits has a huge impact on the remainder of their lives.”
The pandemic’s death toll also extends beyond COVID-19 related deaths, said Dix. Health officials also foresaw the devastating impact the pandemic would have on the province’s overdose crisis.
In 2020, 1,716 people died due to illicit drug use — B.C.’s deadliest year on record for drug overdoses, with almost five people dying every day on average, according to the BC Coroners Service.
Join us as experts answer some of your vaccine questions on a special CBC News National Town Hall on Tuesday, March 9. We’ll discuss the differences between vaccines, how vaccine passports work and where you might be in the queue. The special starts at 8 p.m. ET on CBC Gem and CBC News Network, and 10 p.m. local time (10:30 p.m. NST) on CBC Television.
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Interior Health says it delivered nearly 800,000 immunization doses last year — a number almost equal to the region’s population.
The released figure of 784,980 comes during National Immunization Awareness Week, which runs April 22-30.
The health care organization, which serves a large area of around 820,000, says it’s using the occasion to boost vaccine rates even though there may be post-pandemic vaccine fatigue.
“This is a very important initiative because it ensures that communicable diseases stay away from a region,” said Dr. Silvina Mema of Interior Health.
However, not all those doses were for COVID; the tally includes childhood immunizations plus immunizations for adults.
But IHA said immunizations are down from the height of the pandemic, when COVID vaccines were rolled out, though it seems to be on par with previous pre-pandemic years.
Interior Health says it’d like to see the overall immunization rate rise.
“Certainly there are some folks who have decided a vaccine is not for them. And they have their reasons,” said Jonathan Spence, manager of communicable disease prevention and control at Interior Health.
“I think there’s a lot of people who are hesitant, but that’s just simply because they have questions.
“And that’s actually part of what we’re celebrating this week is those public health nurses, those pharmacists, who can answer questions and answer questions with really good information around immunization.”
Mima echoed that sentiment.
“We take immunization very seriously. It’s a science-based program that has saved countless lives across the world and eliminated diseases that were before a threat and now we don’t see them anymore,” she said.
“So immunization is very important.”
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that samples of pasteurized milk had tested positive for remnants of the bird flu virus that has infected dairy cows.
The agency stressed that the material is inactivated and that the findings “do not represent actual virus that may be a risk to consumers.” Officials added that they’re continuing to study the issue.
“To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the FDA said in a statement.
The announcement comes nearly a month after an avian influenza virus that has sickened millions of wild and commercial birds in recent years was detected in dairy cows in at least eight states. The Agriculture Department says 33 herds have been affected to date.
FDA officials didn’t indicate how many samples they tested or where they were obtained. The agency has been evaluating milk during processing and from grocery stores, officials said. Results of additional tests are expected in “the next few days to weeks.”
The PCR lab test the FDA used would have detected viral genetic material even after live virus was killed by pasteurization, or heat treatment, said Lee-Ann Jaykus, an emeritus food microbiologist and virologist at North Carolina State University
“There is no evidence to date that this is infectious virus and the FDA is following up on that,” Jaykus said.
Officials with the FDA and the USDA had previously said milk from affected cattle did not enter the commercial supply. Milk from sick animals is supposed to be diverted and destroyed. Federal regulations require milk that enters interstate commerce to be pasteurized.
Because the detection of the bird flu virus known as Type A H5N1 in dairy cattle is new and the situation is evolving, no studies on the effects of pasteurization on the virus have been completed, FDA officials said. But past research shows that pasteurization is “very likely” to inactivate heat-sensitive viruses like H5N1, the agency added.
Matt Herrick, a spokesman for the International Dairy Foods Association, said that time and temperature regulations for pasteurization ensure that the commercial U.S. milk supply is safe. Remnants of the virus “have zero impact on human health,” he wrote in an email.
Scientists confirmed the H5N1 virus in dairy cows in March after weeks of reports that cows in Texas were suffering from a mysterious malady. The cows were lethargic and saw a dramatic reduction in milk production. Although the H5N1 virus is lethal to commercial poultry, most infected cattle seem to recover within two weeks, experts said.
To date, two people in U.S. have been infected with bird flu. A Texas dairy worker who was in close contact with an infected cow recently developed a mild eye infection and has recovered. In 2022, a prison inmate in a work program caught it while killing infected birds at a Colorado poultry farm. His only symptom was fatigue, and he recovered.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Canada is about where it should be when it comes to childhood vaccines, but for adult vaccinations it’s a different story.
Dr. Vivien Brown of Immunize Canada says the overall population should have rates of between 80 and 90 per cent for most vaccines, but that is not the case.
She says most children are in that range but not for adult vaccines and ultimately the most at-risk populations are not being reached.
She says the population is under immunized for conditions such as pneumonia, shingles, tetanus, and pertussis.
Brown wants people to talk with their family physician or pharmacist to see if they are up-to-date on vaccines, and to get caught up because many are “killer diseases.”
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