New Brunswickers 'living with COVID' without the numbers they've grown used to

The government is asking New Brunswickers to manage their own risks for COVID-19 now that all Public Health measures have been lifted, but at the same time, it's providing less data about the virus to help them gauge that risk.

The COVID-19 dashboard will now be updated every Tuesday instead of daily for the rest of the month.

In April, it will be dropped altogether and COVID information will instead be shared weekly in the communicable disease section of the Public Health website.

Department of Health officials have not said whether all of the same data will still be available. But Dr. Jennifer Russell, chief medical officer of health, did say the department will "start to diminish the reporting … to more of a surveillance dashboard."

In addition, parents are no longer required to report if their children test positive to their school.

Ray Harris, a Fredericton-based data strategist, says "it's going to be very challenging" for people who have gotten used to judging their risk based on the daily hospitalizations and infections.

He thinks weekly updates are "a reasonable cadence to make informed decisions.

"But if that follows through and in April, it's pulled completely, then, you know, it's very hard to manage your own risk when you don't know what the risk is."

Russell said if people have somebody who's vulnerable in their household or social circle, such as someone with a compromised immune system or a chronic disease, then their risk continues to be high, and will be "in perpetuity" during a pandemic.

She encourages those people to continue masking indoors as much as possible when they're around people from outside their household.

"I think people are really confident in their ability to use all the tools in the toolkit that we've been providing throughout this pandemic. We've evolved so much with each and every surge, with each and every variant. We've learned so much, along with vaccination."

Raywat Deonandan, an epidemiologist and an associate professor at the University of Ottawa, questions the reason for doing away with the dashboard.

"Is it because they haven't got the resources to maintain it? All right. That's a reasonable argument to make. If that's the case, get more resources," he said.

"Or is it because they want to pretend the crisis is over, and 'what's the point of having daily reporting on something that doesn't matter anymore?'