How COVID changed Canadians, their health and the future
CBC
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Five years ago this week, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, warning that the situation would worsen for countries around the world.
"We expect to see the number of cases, the number of deaths, and the number of affected countries climb even higher," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at the time.
Canada had already reported 1,360 cases by March 12, 2020. In a matter of days, governments closed schools and told travellers to self-isolate, the House of Commons shut down and borders were closed to most travellers.
Five years later, COVID-19 is in the rear-view mirror for most Canadians. Yet its effects live on, and they continue to have an impact on the health of Canadians. Here's how.
The initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic brought stay-at-home measures to protect our health and Canada's health-care systems from the effects of the new virus.
"It is the Canadian public that suffered through those public health measures, but they were very effective," said Dr. Fahad Razak, an internist at St. Michael's Hospital and a professor and research chair at the University of Toronto.
"There was one very important notable exception, which is long-term care," said Razak.
Canada had the second-lowest mortality rate after Japan, Razak and his team reported. The country also had the highest vaccination rate for two doses of the vaccine between Feb. 4, 2020, and Feb. 8, 2022.
By December 2020, after the second COVID wave had passed through the country, more than 15,000 people had died, according to Statistics Canada.
Razak's team estimated 70,000 more Canadians would have died, if Canada's vaccination and death rates had been similar to those in the U.S.
"That means that probably most of us would personally know someone who is alive today, but would have died if we had had the infection rates and the death rates that the United States had," Razak said.
As in other countries, deaths in Canada disproportionately occurred among front-line workers, such as meat-packing plant labourers, compared with those who worked from home.
But Canada had one of the highest long-term care mortality rates of any comparable G10 country, Razak said. Overcrowding and problems with staffing contributed to the excess deaths, he said.
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