The last two months in South Korea suggest we may be hit much harder than that.
How much harder? On March 16, South Korea reported 621,328 new cases in the previous 24 hours, up 55 percent from 400,741 the previous day (about 70,000 March 15 cases were tallied late and then added to the March 16 count).
Equally shocking is the speed with which South Korea reached these numbers.
The highly infectious new Omicron sub-variant BA.2 was a factor in the spike. But South Korean health officials had also relaxed public health measures like quarantines, as well as increasing the size of private gatherings from six to eight in recent weeks, the paper said. That was partly due to an impending presidential election.
The paper quoted a professor of preventive medicine: “It seemed like they were trying to appeal to the voters, who were tired of the social distancing measures, by giving them more freedom.”
Another medical expert cited population density: half of the country’s 52 million people live in the Seoul metropolitan area. And authorities had been too reliant on South Korea’s high vaccination rate (87 per cent of South Korea’s population is fully vaccinated, compared to Canada’s 82 per cent).
“Vaccines are not a panacea against Omicron,” said Dr. Chon Eun-mi of Ewha Women’s University Mokdong Hospital in the report. “They may prevent patients from falling into critical condition, but the vaccines developed to this date have proven to have little effect in preventing Omicron infections.”
Dangerously relaxed
Despite soaring case counts, people in many countries seem to have made a separate peace with COVID, silently accepting the harm it continues to inflict. Germany’s new chancellor Olaf Scholz has said, “We are entering a new phase of the pandemic, in which we, like nearly all our neighbouring countries, will be getting rid of nearly all protective measures.”
In Canada, we’re also dangerously relaxed. Incoming vaccinated travellers who arrive on April 1 or later won’t have to take a pre-entry COVID test.
Ontario’s COVID-19 science table predicts an uptick in hospitalizations but not a major increase in cases. Alberta has moved to the second phase of its three-step strategy to lift public health measures, dropping limits on indoor and outdoor gatherings, capacity on large venues and entertainment sites, and most mask mandates.
Here in B.C., cruise ships will be back in April, and ships must have plans for dealing with the inevitable COVID outbreaks. In effect, COVID will be just another hazard of cruising, like norovirus and bad weather.
The B.C. COVID-19 dashboard looks like the reverse of South Korea’s numbers. We peaked on Dec. 21, 2021 with a seven-day rolling daily average of 4,078, followed by a steep drop to 237 on March 15.
We’ve dropped a number of public health restrictions, notably the mask mandate. In effect, Dr. Bonnie Henry and the NDP provincial government have left it up to us to mask and distance ourselves.
But only if we’re in the mood.
Living in the moment, not looking ahead
So we are entering spring with far more travellers coming into the province from overseas, and with far less screening; we never did do much testing or contact tracing, so we don’t even have a good estimate of what our real case and death counts might be. The medical journal The Lancet recently estimated the true mortality of the pandemic so far at 18.2 million. So we may have lost as many as 9,000 British Columbians, not 3,000.
The B.C. government seems to have decided that this is a good time to be neglectful. As long as our overworked and understaffed health-care services aren’t totally swamped, the government doesn’t care if we get sick. So we can be free to get up close and personal with friends and strangers alike. Old folks and the immunocompromised are equally free to stay home and not make a fuss. And everyone is free to make a fuss by driving around in big trucks.
But the B.C. government is living in the moment and not looking ahead. Someone could arrive tomorrow from Germany, South Korea or Hong Kong — or Kyiv, Moscow or London — and spread a whole new wave of COVID-19. That would bring down many of our hospitals, force workers to stay home or spread the virus to their fellow workers and customers, and implode the barely re-inflated economy.
The B.C. government, like most governments, would have to flip from neglect to panic yet again. But this time we can hope that Adrian Dix and Bonnie Henry will finally realize that panic gets them nowhere, and neglect is even worse.
They need to protect everyone, all the time — toddlers, elders, the immunocompromised and everyone else. They need to tell us the facts, not sing us lullabies. And they need to decide how to minimize COVID cases so they can also minimize long COVID.
If not, they will have to deal with thousands more British Columbians who’ve become long haulers. One recent study found that up to 70 per cent of them may have impaired memory and focus.
Instead of helping to build a better post-pandemic B.C., they will be an ongoing problem. If we treat them as casually as we’ve treated COVID itself, they will be a problem we never solve.
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