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Several B.C. doctors warn the province is not prepared heading into the fall and winter respiratory illness season.
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As the province prepares to launch its fall COVID-19 vaccination campaign, doctors, researchers and teachers worry not enough is being done to avoid another triple epidemic.
Dr. Sanjiv Gandhi, the B.C. Green party’s deputy leader, said the province is “horribly prepared” heading into the fall and winter respiratory illness season.
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“I think we’re less prepared this year than any time in the last several years,” Gandhi told Postmedia News Friday.
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Last year, the province still required masks in hospitals and health care settings. This year, “none of that currently exists,” he said. He also noted the province has also been slow to upgrade the ventilation systems in schools, hospitals and public indoor settings.
“I’m very worried about what this means for our kids,” said Gandhi, a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon and former chief of cardiac surgery at B.C. Children’s Hospital.
Protect our Province B.C., a coalition of doctors, nurses, health researchers and school safety advocates, warns the province is headed for a repeat of the triple threat of COVID-19, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and flu that clogged hospitals and killed six children last winter.
“In short, we are on track for a rinse-and-repeat of last year,” the group said this week in an open letter to Premier David Eby, Health Minister Adrian Dix and Education Minister Rachna Singh.
“I do feel like we are in a worse position (than last winter) because of the complacency of people,” Jennifer Heighton, a Vancouver-based elementary school teacher and co-founder of Protect our Province B.C. “I think the pandemic has been downplayed this whole past year. And not enough has been explained to people about the long-term harm from previous COVID infections.”
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Dr. Lyne Filiatrault, a retired emergency physician who worked at Vancouver General Hospital for 22 years and a signatory to the open letter, said it’s important to look at what’s happening elsewhere in the world, including the United States, which has already had a 12.5 per cent increase in hospital admissions.
Public health officials have learned “zero lessons” since the six child deaths and overcrowded emergency rooms last winter, Filiatrault said.
“We are using a vax-only strategy,” she said, which ignores other safety measures like air filtration and masking.
“This virus needs you to be two steps ahead,” she said. B.C.’s public health officials “are going to be reactive again.”
Filiatrault is concerned the public health messaging is not focused enough on the potentially debilitating impacts of long COVID, symptoms that can include chronic pain, brain fog, shortness of breath, chest pain, fatigue and neurological symptoms.
“There’s a level of complacency within public health that basically stops counting the impact of this virus after 30 days and it’s not counting the excess mortality,” she said.
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A University of British Columbia study showed that while B.C. had one of the lowest mortality rates from COVID-19 in North America, it had the highest excess deaths — the number of deaths above what would normally be expected based on modelling and previous years — of any Canada province.
Protect our Province wants the government to install HEPA filters in all B.C. classrooms to improve air ventilation and reinstate school mask mandates. Heighton wants the province to bring back PCR testing to detect the prevalence of the virus instead of relying on less-accurate waste water monitoring.
There were seven COVID-related deaths in the last week of July, the most recent data available through the B.C. Centre for Disease Control’s Situation report. In the past week, eight patients were in critical care in B.C. with COVID-19.
Heighton, Gandhi and Filiatrault are concerned by B.C.’s low vaccination rate among children and youth: 16 per cent of children aged four and under are fully vaccinated, 19 per cent of kids between five and 11 have three doses, and 38 per cent of youth 12 to 17 have three doses.
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Public health officials are not pushing vaccination in kids, Filiatrault said.
The provincial health officer was not available for an interview Friday but Dr. Bonnie Henry said in a statement that B.C. will be launching a fall vaccination campaign to roll out the updated COVID-19 vaccine, a new version of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna which is currently waiting for Health Canada approval.
Henry said because the new COVID-19 vaccines provide the best protection against the current strain of SARS CoV-2 and its variants, those who are fully vaccinated should wait for the updated dose rather than receive bivalent vaccine boosters now.
“Similar to what we do with influenza, we look at what the likely strains to be circulating and causing illness in the upcoming season will be,” Henry said in the statement. “That is why it is really important to get this updated vaccine — it builds on the immunity that you’ve had from previous vaccinations.”
The province will provide more details on the fall vaccination campaign in the coming weeks, Henry said.
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Caroline Colijn, an epidemiologist at Simon Fraser University and a Canada 150 research chair in mathematics for evolution, infection and public health, said a low rate of COVID infections over the summer coupled with the high number of people who have received their last booster shot more than six months ago causes concern that British Columbians may be more susceptible to infection.
The province is also monitoring the prevalence of the EG.5 variant, a descendant of the Omicron variant XBB.1.9.2 which is now the dominant strain in the United States. Henry said the variant is circulating in B.C. and other parts of Canada at low levels.
“The best defence against COVID-19 continues to be a multi-layered approach involving vaccination, staying home when unwell, masking when in crowded indoor spaces, and hand washing,” Henry said.
kderosa@postmedia.com
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