Sorry for the pause in blogging; I've been working on a Tyee piece based on the CMAJ article I linked to this morning. Its author, Dr. Peter Phillips, head of the infectious diseases division of the UBC School of Medicine, kindly cooperated. Here's my take: New China Data Undercuts Reassurances by Our Health Officials. Excerpt:
Every afternoon, B.C.’s Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix offer a daily update on the COVID-19 situation across the province. Both offer solid performances, calm, frank, and reassuring even when the news is grim.
But it’s not really news. Each day’s new cases and deaths reflect some fraction of those who were infected up to two long weeks ago. And some of those mid-March cases may have been caused by persons who showed no symptoms but still carried — and shed — the virus that causes COVID-19.
Dr. Henry downplayed that possibility in a March 31 interview on CBC Radio’s Early Edition, saying a few such cases might exist and might be a “challenge,” but they were not enough to be concerned about.
Events have already overtaken her reassurances. That same morning, China’s National Health Commission dropped a bombshell: as of Monday, the Chinese are aware of 1,541 asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers in the country, including 205 imported cases. What’s more, China will henceforth report these as active cases and quarantine them and their contacts just like symptomatic cases.
Public health experts elsewhere in the world might be excused for swearing under their breath about Chinese secrecy; clearly, the National Health Commission has known about such cases for some time without publishing anything about them. But the new revelation helps to explain why everyone in China is wearing a mask, even when the World Health Organization says only symptomatic people should wear them.
Our own B.C. C.D.C. says the same thing: “It may be less effective to wear a mask in the community when a person is not sick themselves. Masks may give a person a false sense of security and are likely to increase the number of times a person will touch their own face (e.g., to adjust the mask).”
Big mistake: no masks
And that also explains why Dr. George Gao, the head of China’s C.D.C., told Science magazine last week that the biggest mistake the West is making is our failure to make everyone wear a mask: “Many people have asymptomatic or presymptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others.”
These developments lend weight to an opinion piece published in CMAJ, the journal of the Canadian Medical Association, on Friday. Its author, Dr. Peter Phillips, is head of the infectious diseases division of the UBC School of Medicine.
Dr. Phillips is blunt: “Canada’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is not strong enough. Despite school closures, measures being taken at borders to minimize spread, and social distancing efforts, and despite the recent announcement of $82 billion to support the business community and the economy, more effort is urgently needed. New cases doubled over four days before reaching 1,426 on March 22, which was after a week of containment measures.”
On March 31, Canada reported 7,474 cases.
Dr. Phillips continues: “Canada’s initial lack of a robust border policy or mandated supervised quarantine program for both incoming travellers and contacts of documented cases has impaired our ability to contain the epidemic here. If the main goal of our response is merely to try to flatten the epidemic curve in order to reduce the extent to which hospitals become overwhelmed, we will fail in Canada.”
