VANCOUVER —
As Canada’s top doctor warned the country about a third wave of COVID-19 driven by variants and researchers urged governments to ramp up testing, B.C. health officials are downplaying the predictions and defending the province’s approach to testing and variants.
Canada’s chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam cautioned that with more-contagious COVID-19 variants now spreading in all provinces, “the current community-based public health measures will be insufficient to control rapid growth and resurgence is forecast.”
That resurgence could lead to a seven-fold increase in daily infections, according to modelling Tam presented in Ottawa.
During her briefing in Vancouver on Friday, B.C.’s deputy provincial health officer Reka Gustafson responded to questions about Tam’s modelling.
“Mathematical models are exactly that, and they take the parameters that we are seeing with these new variants and can give us potential scenarios,” Gustafson said. “They don’t predict what’s going to happen, and I think that’s really important to remember.”
“There is actually no indication from the behavior of the variants that we need to do anything that is different, and what we mean by that is that the mode of transmission of the new variants is very similar, the virus is just more efficient (in its) transmission … The things that we need to do to prevent the transmission of variants are the exact same things we do to prevent COVID-19, but we have less room for error.”
Tam and other experts have been taking a more aggressive tone in warning citizens that the mutations that make the virus more contagious and deadly can spread with alarming speed, as seen in Newfoundland and Labrador this month, requiring both careful monitoring and a willingness to make amendments to public health orders.
Adding further concern to the situation, a team of B.C. university researchers is urging governments to swiftly ramp up detection of the variants, lest they spread undetected.
“I’m very concerned about the higher transmissibility of these variants — we’re going to hit a wall in Canada when these variants start circulating in the community and we’re going to have to see much more strict regulations to bend the curve down with such a rapidly growing variant,” said UBC biomathematician and study co-author Sally Otto.
“We constructed a model that would predict by the time you find your first case, how many other cases would there be in the community? And the thing is, if we don’t look at a lot of cases, if we don’t do a lot of sequencing, there could be hundreds of cases by the time we detect a case in the community.”
B.C. was one of the first provinces to adopt a more efficient process for screening for variants, which is much more complex and time-consuming than a standard COVID-19 test, which provides a response within 24 to 48 hours.
Only after someone tests positive are specially selected samples sent to a B.C. Centre for Disease Control lab – one of only a handful in the country capable of further testing – for targeted PCR testing to search for a mutation the three main variants of concern have in common. If the mutation is detected, then full genome sequencing is done to determine which variant in particular has been discovered; the process takes almost a week.
“In order to really find it when it’s one or a few people, before it gets out and established within the community, we have to ramp up that testing pretty much every week or every other week,” Otto said.
That suggestion comes as B.C. testing rates remain relatively stagnant. While the health minister and provincial health officer had promised a capacity for 20,000 tests per day by the fall, actual tests have never come near that. The most tests performed in a single day was 15,213 on Nov. 27, around the height of the province’s second wave. Since then, daily tests have been largely under the 8,000 mark.
On a national scale, B.C. is also well behind on testing, especially compared to the other most populous provinces on a per capita basis. Canada-wide, there have been 614,953 tests for every million residents, but B.C. has only conducted 357,341 per million. Alberta is at 748,995 while Ontario and Quebec are virtually tied around 700,000.
“Our testing guidelines in British Columbia have actually quite a low threshold,” Gustafson said. “We actually have no indication that we’re missing large numbers of cases or even substantial number of cases.”
“One of the reasons may be that our testing is relatively low is that the measures that we’re taking that reduce the rate of COVID-19 actually reduce other respiratory illnesses as well, and because we generally test people with symptoms of respiratory illness, if we have less respiratory illness in the community, fewer people will be will be presenting testing,” she said.
When asked whether the province had any plans or benchmarks at which it would implement stricter restrictions, particularly in light of Ontario communities extending lockdowns as they hunt for variants, Gustafson suggested that wasn’t necessary.
“The mode of transmission, how long you’re infectious, the fact it’s spread through respiratory droplets – those have not changed (with the variants),” she said. “Which means, really, it’s really not a question of doing something different. It just makes us sure that we absolutely have to do our very best to follow those measures and to really do excellent case and contact management, which means that all contacts who were asked to self-isolate, actually need to self-isolate, need to adhere to those recommendations given by public health, because there’s less room for error.”
Some Ontario doctors have started offering a free shot that can protect babies from respiratory syncytial virus while Quebec will begin its immunization program next month.
The new shot called Nirsevimab gives babies antibodies that provide passive immunity to RSV, a major cause of serious lower respiratory tract infections for infants and seniors, which can cause bronchiolitis or pneumonia.
Ontario’s ministry of health says the shot is already available at some doctor’s offices in Ontario with the province’s remaining supply set to arrive by the end of the month.
Quebec will begin administering the shots on Nov. 4 to babies born in hospitals and delivery centers.
Parents in Quebec with babies under six months or those who are older but more vulnerable to infection can also book immunization appointments online.
The injection will be available in Nunavut and Yukon this fall and winter, though administration start dates have not yet been announced.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 21, 2024.
-With files from Nicole Ireland
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
ISLAMABAD (AP) — Polio cases are rising ahead of a new vaccination campaign in Pakistan, where violence targeting health workers and the police protecting them has hampered years of efforts toward making the country polio-free.
Since January, health officials have confirmed 39 new polio cases in Pakistan, compared to only six last year, said Anwarul Haq of the National Emergency Operation Center for Polio Eradication.
The new nationwide drive starts Oct. 28 with the aim to vaccinate at least 32 million children. “The whole purpose of these campaigns is to achieve the target of making Pakistan a polio-free state,” he said.
Pakistan regularly launches campaigns against polio despite attacks on the workers and police assigned to the inoculation drives. Militants falsely claim the vaccination campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilize children.
Most of the new polio cases were reported in the southwestern Balochistan and southern Sindh province, following by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and eastern Punjab province.
The locations are worrying authorities since previous cases were from the restive northwest bordering Afghanistan, where the Taliban government in September suddenly stopped a door-to-door vaccination campaign.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are the two countries in which the spread of the potentially fatal, paralyzing disease has never been stopped. Authorities in Pakistan have said that the Taliban’s decision will have major repercussions beyond the Afghan border, as people from both sides frequently travel to each other’s country.
The World Health Organization has confirmed 18 polio cases in Afghanistan this year, all but two in the south of the country. That’s up from six cases in 2023. Afghanistan used a house-to-house vaccination strategy this June for the first time in five years, a tactic that helped to reach the majority of children targeted, according to WHO.
Health officials in Pakistan say they want the both sides to conduct anti-polio drives simultaneously.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Millions of people with private health insurance would be able to pick up over-the-counter methods like condoms, the “morning after” pill and birth control pills for free under a new rule the White House proposed on Monday.
Right now, health insurers must cover the cost of prescribed contraception, including prescription birth control or even condoms that doctors have issued a prescription for. But the new rule would expand that coverage, allowing millions of people on private health insurance to pick up free condoms, birth control pills, or “morning after” pills from local storefronts without a prescription.
The proposal comes days before Election Day, as Vice President Kamala Harris affixes her presidential campaign to a promise of expanding women’s health care access in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to undo nationwide abortion rights two years ago. Harris has sought to craft a distinct contrast from her Republican challenger, Donald Trump, who appointed some of the judges who issued that ruling.
“The proposed rule we announce today would expand access to birth control at no additional cost for millions of consumers,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “Bottom line: women should have control over their personal health care decisions. And issuers and providers have an obligation to comply with the law.”
The emergency contraceptives that people on private insurance would be able to access without costs include levonorgestrel, a pill that needs to be taken immediately after sex to prevent pregnancy and is more commonly known by the brand name “Plan B.”
Without a doctor’s prescription, women may pay as much as $50 for a pack of the pills. And women who delay buying the medication in order to get a doctor’s prescription could jeopardize the pill’s effectiveness, since it is most likely to prevent a pregnancy within 72 hours after sex.
If implemented, the new rule would also require insurers to fully bear the cost of the once-a-day Opill, a new over-the-counter birth control pill that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved last year. A one-month supply of the pills costs $20.
Federal mandates for private health insurance to cover contraceptive care were first introduced with the Affordable Care Act, which required plans to pick up the cost of FDA-approved birth control that had been prescribed by a doctor as a preventative service.
The proposed rule would not impact those on Medicaid, the insurance program for the poorest Americans. States are largely left to design their own rules around Medicaid coverage for contraception, and few cover over-the-counter methods like Plan B or condoms.
