Key public health decisions made in N.B. in February informed partly by false death counts
CBC
Dozens of missing COVID-19 death records revealed by the New Brunswick government last week caused health officials to mislead themselves about when fatalities from last winter's Omicron wave had peaked just as they were faced with critical decisions about when to loosen health protections.
On Friday at a hastily scheduled briefing, New Brunswick's lead epidemiologist Mathieu Chalifoux revealed the discovery of 142 previously missed "death forms" that listed COVID-19 as a primary killer of 125 people that were previously not counted as victims of COVID-19.
The forms also revealed the virus was noted as being present at the time of death in 17 others.
"Counts during the Omicron wave did not accurately reflect.the situation as it unfolded," said Chalifoux on Friday
The missing deaths spanned six months between December 2021 and May 2022 as the first wave of the COVID-19 Omicron variant was hitting the province.
More than half of the uncounted fatalities were from the months of February and March. That's when New Brunswick health officials were considering and then executing a plan to become the first Maritime province to end mandatory masking and other health protections, including in schools.
On Feb. 24, New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs and Chief Medical officer of Health Dr. Jennifer Russell held a news conference to announce dangers from Omicron had subsided enough to allow for an end of the province's state of emergency and the mandatory wearing of masks in public on March 14.
And they insisted all the data they had in hand supported that decision.
"We got better through COVID in identifying the risks," said Higgs.
But at the time, the deadliness of Omicron and the trajectory of when its killing had hit a peak in New Brunswick were both being misjudged by health officials because of the missing death records
Up until last week the province had reported Omicron deaths peaked in January at 83 and then declined 24 per cent in February to 63.
Instead, given definitions of what then constituted a COVID death in New Brunswick fatalities should have shown 91 in January had the records not been missing. Those numbers then would have increased, not decreased in February to 100.
Additional missing deaths from March (31) and then April (26) continued to disguise Omicron's deadliness and the rate that it was receding through the spring . By May the publicly reported data was so erroneous health officials declared just 14 deaths. They now acknowledge it was actually 35 that month, 150 per cent higher.
On Friday Chalifoux appeared to blame a poorly executed transition of responsibilities for tracking and reporting deaths away from COVID case and contact management personnel in January for what happened.
This story is a collaboration between the Investigative Journalism Foundation and CBC Saskatchewan.
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