Manitoba, Quebec tied for highest COVID-19 death rate

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This article was published 03/02/2022 (1371 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba’s COVID-19 death rate is now tied for highest in the country — but one researcher says the true toll is likely much higher.

On Thursday, Statistics Canada released COVID-19 figures that show Manitoba and Quebec were tied for the highest rate of COVID-19 deaths over the past week, at 3.8 per 100,000 people.

The data was updated one day after Manitoba’s premier suggested the province would review its death count data to ensure it’s in line with how other provinces record COVID-19 fatalities.

“When it comes to deaths and how they’re reported in comparison to other provinces, I think we are looking, and I’ve asked for those numbers to see… we comparing apples to apples when it comes to this,” Premier Heather Stefanson said Wednesday, when asked how she reconciles Manitoba’s high death rate to the province’s decision to relax public health restrictions next week.

“But to all those Manitobans: we know this has been an incredibly difficult time. We know that there has been a loss of loved ones, and what I would say as well to Manitobans… we will get through this together.”

One of Canada’s researchers on COVID-19 mortality rates estimates every province except for Quebec is under-detecting its COVID-19 deaths and could be failing to capture as many as half of its pandemic fatalities.

“It looked like Manitoba was probably doing better on reporting than most Canadian provinces except Quebec, which is the gold standard,” said Tara Moriarty, associate professor and infectious disease researcher at the University of Toronto.

However, Manitoba’s death reporting has been stalled since about November 2020, she said, so not much reliable data is available about the third and fourth waves of the pandemic or about the current impact of the Omicron variant.

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that Manitoba is probably missing 50 per cent of its COVID deaths, and it’s purely because death reporting is so slow in Canada.”

Moriarty was the lead author of a July 2021 report on COVID-19 deaths for the Royal Society of Canada.

As part of her research, she’s been tracking excess mortality in Canada during the pandemic, and compares provincial death counts to the number of COVID-19 deaths recorded by the Canadian Vital Death Statistics Database.

There’s a lag time of up to two years before deaths show up in the national database, but Moriarty has found about 10 per cent of deaths listed as caused by COVID-19 in the database weren’t reported by provinces. The other 40 per cent of estimated missing deaths are likely cases in which people died without being tested, she said.

That doesn’t account for people who have died of other causes because they weren’t able to access health care during the pandemic. But in Quebec, which reports deaths quicker and was conducting post-mortem COVID-19 tests, Moriarty said researchers are starting to see an increasing number of deaths linked to diabetes and kidney disease.

When asked about Manitoba’s current backlog in reporting COVID-19 deaths, and how long it typically takes for a COVID-19 fatality to be included in provincial data, a provincial spokesperson did not answer Thursday, saying only: “Every case is different. It depends on the information and investigation.”

On Thursday, seven deaths were announced by the province, but no timeframe was provided as to when those seven Manitobans died.

Eddie Calisto-Tavares lost her father, Manuel, to COVID-19 in an outbreak at Maples personal care home in 2020. She said the premier’s remarks about the death-toll data made her “blood boil.”

Those comments and previous responses from the provincial government have been detached from the reality that many families are still grieving, she said.

“It was just statistics, it was just numbers. There was not a moment of reflection that these are people. That there are families that are still grieving, like mine. We didn’t even allow for space to honour them,” she said.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca