COVID-19 is killing fewer people, but Quebec still reporting dozens of deaths daily

While vaccination and improved treatment have made COVID less deadly, Quebec reported its 15,000th death on Saturday attributed to the virus — the most in Canada.

Percylla Battista said she last spoke to her sister, Maggie Quart Robitaille, a week before Quart Robitaille tested positive for COVID-19.

“She was feeling pretty good,” Battista said in a recent interview. “She didn’t think she would get COVID because she had already been vaccinated four times.”

But on April 13, Quart Robitaille died at age 82, less than two weeks after testing positive for COVID-19. She was among the 3,325 people reported to have died in the province from the novel coronavirus since the Omicron wave started in mid-December.

While vaccination and improved treatment have made COVID-19 less deadly, Quebec reported Saturday that there have been 15,000 deaths attributed to the pandemic in the province — the most in Canada. Quebec’s death rate also remains the highest in the country, at 174 deaths per 100,000 people. In Ontario, there have been 86 deaths per 100,000 people. Across Canada, there have been 102.

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Simona Bignami, a demography professor at Université de Montreal who studies population health, said less attention is being paid to people who have recently died of the disease, like Quart Robitaille, compared to those who died during the pandemic’s first wave, which killed more than 5,686 people.

It’s understandable, Bignami said in a recent interview, that people are trying to regain some sense of normalcy. But in doing so, she said, “there has been, unfortunately, less emphasis on the people who continue to die of COVID-19.”

While COVID-19 deaths tend to be concentrated among people who are 70 and over, Bignami said that over the past year, the proportion of people between 50 and 69 who have died has risen.