Via The Globe and Mail: Canada on track for 4,000 coronavirus patients in hospital by Christmas, eclipsing first wave. Excerpt:
Canada is on track to have 4,000 coronavirus patients in hospital by Christmas, a figure that would eclipse the peak of the first wave and put tremendous pressure on a health-care system already pushed to the brink by nine months of battling the pandemic.
A new analysis conducted for The Globe and Mail by researchers at British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University projects that the number of Canadians admitted to hospital for treatment of COVID-19 will continue to grow, with the steepest increases in the West, particularly in Alberta.
If Alberta stays on its current trajectory, the province’s physicians and nurses will be caring for more COVID-19 patients – as many as 1,300 in the worst-case scenario – than Ontario, which has three times the population. There were 425 COVID-19 patients in Alberta hospitals on Sunday.
By contrast, Ontario and Quebec, the twin epicentres of Canada’s spring wave, are expected to see slower growth in the number of COVID-19 hospital admissions over the next four weeks, but growth nonetheless.
Meanwhile, the number of new cases reported daily across the country has increased by more than 2,000 since the beginning of November and is closing in on 6,000 a day.
Jens von Bergmann, the mathematical modeller who produced the hospitalization forecasts for The Globe, stressed that his projections offer a glimpse of what could be, not what has to be, even though the lag between infections and admissions mean part of the trend is already baked in. COVID-19 hospitalization projections
Recently imposed government restrictions and individual choices could turn the tide, he said. “The key is that in all of these models, we are actually still in control of what’s going to happen at the end of December.”
Over the past week, there has been an average of just over 2,000 COVID-19 patients being treated in Canadian hospitals, 420 of them in critical-care units, according to a Globe and Mail tally of provincial data. Both figures have nearly doubled since the end of October.
The national totals aren’t as high as the peak of the first wave, when the seven-day average of cases in hospital topped 3,000 in mid-April. But the geography of the second wave is different.
Gone are the days when COVID-19 was primarily a Central Canadian scourge. Hospitals in Manitoba, Alberta and B.C. have long blown past their spring peaks. Manitoba hospitals were treating an average of 285 coronavirus patients a day last week. They averaged 11 at the height of the first wave. While Quebec and Ontario are generally in better shape, hospitals in their hot zones are struggling.
Canada’s hospitals held up well during the first wave, thanks to the staff and space freed up by halting elective procedures and a collective effort to bend the curve. This time, hospitals are caring for COVID-19 patients and trying to keep scheduled surgeries running at the same time, all while staff are experiencing existential levels of exhaustion and the public has grown weary of physical distancing.
Doctors, nurses and other hospital workers will be all the more burned out – and less able to provide the best care for patients – if the SFU team’s worst-case projections for coronavirus hospital admissions come to pass.
“[People] talk about front-line workers as if there’s somebody waiting in the wings to step in if we fall,” said Meighan Jones, an emergency nurse in Edmonton. “But there is nobody waiting in the wings. We’re all that there is.”
