Current COVID-19 wave won’t be a repeat of pandemic’s early days, doctor says

Despite record high case numbers in recent days, the latest wave of COVID-19 is far from becoming a repeat of the pandemic’s early days, one infectious disease expert says.

“What this is showing is that we have this mild virus right now, for the most part, especially if you’re vaccinated, ripping through the population and that’s going to cause a lot of — and I mean this in a good way — immunity,” Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti, an infectious diseases specialist with Trillium Health Partners in Mississauga, Ont., said Tuesday in a interview with CTV’s Your Morning.

“And I think that this is actually a different step. So I think people are thinking we’re back in March 2020, but this is very far from that.”

Chakrabarti says after this current wave, he expects the COVID-19 situation to move to a more “endemic” or “low-grade phase.”

“But I think that this is actually, believe it or not, good news. But again, if you haven’t gotten vaccinated yet that’s the best defence we have against the virus and I urge you to do so.”

Canada has seen a steep rise in COVID-19 cases throughout the month of December, as more people move indoors and gather for the holidays, with the country’s seven-day rolling average for new daily cases sitting at more than 19,600 as of Monday, according to data tracked by CTVNews.ca.

The rise in cases comes amid the spread of the new Omicron variant. While believed to be more transmissible and able to evade some vaccine protection compared to the previous Delta variant, evidence has emerged that it may result in less severe illness and reduce the chance of being hospitalized. However, experts are warning that Omicron still poses great risk to the unvaccinated.

Chakrabarti and others have spoken about the importance of considering other important metrics such as hospitalizations and per cent positivity alongside new cases.

Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist and faculty member at the University of Toronto, told CTV’s Your Morning earlier this month that monitoring hospitalizations and hospital capacity is “extremely important” given Canada’s “pretty limited ICU capacity,” adding there is “no one metric that tells the whole story.”

At this point in the year, Chakrabarti says respiratory viruses will cause hospital admissions, which was known even before COVID-19 emerged.

He said the current low number of ICU admissions is “actually quite a good thing.”

“… Given that our hospitals are relatively decompressed this late into the season, and the fact that I think that this COVID wave will start to crash and come down very soon, I think we’re in a very good position,” he said.

“I know it doesn’t feel like that based on what we’re hearing, but I think that we are in that situation.”

Chakrabarti added that even though the Omicron variant can cause hospital admissions, it appears to be causing far fewer admissions in intensive care.

“And that’s big, because our hospital work beds have more capacity than ICU.”

HOSPITALIZATIONS AND INTENSIVE CARE

Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott reported Tuesday on Twitter that 491 people were in hospital due to COVID-19 in the province, with 187 in intensive care units.

Hospitalizations tend to lag behind reports of new cases, and publicly available data from the Ontario government shows hospitalizations have increased steadily, but remain far below the highs of the more than 2,000 in hospital, including more than 800 in ICUs back in late April and early May. At the same point in 2020, roughly 1,000 people were in hospital some days, with more than 200 people in intensive care.

Unvaccinated Canadians continue to be disproportionately represented in ICU.

Since Dec. 1, 141 people have died from COVID-19 in Ontario as of Dec. 24, or an average of about six people per day.

VACCINES MAKING ‘DRAMATIC DIFFERENCE’

Speaking on CTV News Channel on Sunday, Dr. Martha Fulford, an infectious disease specialist at McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton, Ont., and an associate professor of medicine at McMaster University, said a lot of people who are currently testing positive for COVID-19 are not getting sick.

“What we have right now is a very high number of positive PCR tests, but the hospitalization rate actually is fairly flat, as is our ICU rate,” she said.

“So I think for the province, one of the things we need to start reporting really accurately is whether or not people are being admitted because of COVID or just with a positive test, because of course everybody gets screened.”

Fulford said we also have to be “very realistic” in that hospital admissions are “never going to be at zero” given that it is respiratory tract season.

“For me, it’s always been that balanced approach,” she said.

The focus, Fulford said, needs to shift to how many patients are being admitted to hospital due to COVID-19, which she says is a “very different number” from total case counts and also a “much less alarming number.”

Fulford pointed to data to help people distinguish between Omicron and the common cold, which she said “tells us that it’s pretty mild.”

For vulnerable adults, namely seniors, those who live in congregate care settings and people with many co-morbidities, who were always at risk of severe disease, Fulford says vaccinations have made a “dramatic difference” in reducing the risk of hospitalization and death.

“Vaccines don’t make a virus go away, they stop severe disease, and I think that’s the message and the balance that we have to try to achieve in our communication,” she said.