Newfoundland and Labrador is already emerging from the
first wave of the COVID-19 infection.
The data from the provincial government’s daily
COVID-19 media briefings is clear.
Starting on April 6,
the number of new cases detected was less than the number of recovered
cases. As the week progressed, the number of recovered cases increased as
rapidly as the infections had increased two weeks before.
The
result, shown in the chart at right, is that the number of active COVID-19
cases (cumulative total less cumulative recovered and deceased) has been
declining steadily.
By the end of this
week, the number of active cases should
be about the same as they were before the massive increases started on 23 March
2020.
The most likely thing that could change that forecast drop
in active cases is an increase in the number of tests conducted by provincial
health officials. But to produce a
dramatic increase in the number of new cases – on the order of what we saw in the
middle of March – the province would have to test thousands of people a day.
That’s
because a consistent testing effort yielded a steadily declining number of new
cases. An average of 177 daily tests the week of March 23 produced an average
number of 18 new cases daily.
The following week 208 daily tests yielded an average
of 12 new cases per day. In the first
full week of April, though, an average of 178 tests a day produced only an
average four new cases.
Any increased rate of testing is unlikely to turn up a
massive number of new cases. Wide-spread
fear of the disease ensures that people who are ill are likely to contact
health authorities for testing. The
existing testing policy screens for high-risk patients in a province full of people
with existing conditions that don’t go well with COVID-19.
The drop in new cases is proof that a combination of
early restrictions under the government’s health emergency powers coupled with
a tradition of winter holiday travel that this year would have happened in
April limited the disease’s impacts on
the province.
Provinces like Ontario and Quebec were in the middle
of March break when Canadian governments started to respond to COVID-19. In Newfoundland Labrador, the winter break is tied to Easter which
this year happened in April. The result
was that when large numbers of Canadians began returning home from the United States the week of March 15, there were
significantly more going to other provinces than returned to Newfoundland and
Labrador.
The number of COVID-19 cases in Newfoundland and Labrador
increased significantly the following week and the number of new cases
continued to grow. But two weeks after
the influx, the number of new cases
started to drop off as limits on public spaces and self-quarantine orders
limited the chances for the disease to spread.
With travel limited and travelers subject to a two-week quarantine, there
was no new source of infection to prompt another flare up.
The restrictions also helped to limit the spread from
the Caul’s cluster. But what that
cluster really shows, though, is that if the sources of new infection from
travel had been the same in Newfoundland and Labrador as in other
provinces, then the local impact of
COVID-19 would be the same as the one currently experience in Alberta, British
Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec.
Many people in Newfoundland and Labrador are wondering
how long the current restrictions will last.
Last week’s government dog and pony show didn’t really give any
information that would help the public figure that out or indeed figure out
very much of anything about what the provincial government is doing. It seemed intended merely to repeat the
message that people need to stay home and limit their movements.
The suggestion that there will be a resurgence of
disease in November – the so-called peak – or the claim that a peak in
hospitalizations in the summer will outstrip
available intensive care spaces seems to come more from assumptions by
government analysts than anything else.
And since those assumptions aren’t in public, there’s
no way of judging whether health minister John Haggie’s forecast that the
current restrictions will still be in place until the end of the year is
justified or is a misreading of the current situation.
At the very least, though, it seems likely that
developments in Newfoundland and Labrador will be driven by events in central
Canada. Until Ontario and Quebec and
other provinces currently struggling with the first wave of COVID-19 get
through their first wave, Newfoundland and Labrador will not relax its
restrictions.
-srbp-
