Early signs suggest 4th wave may have reached a plateau in Manitoba

After two weeks where COVID-19 cases in Manitoba grew at an exponential rate, there are now early signs the fourth wave of the pandemic may have reached a plateau in this province.

From Sept. 21 to Oct. 5, the average daily COVID-19 case count in Manitoba jumped from 60 to 105, which works out to a weekly increase of 32 per cent.

Had this rate of growth continued, this province would have ended up with 300 cases a day just after Halloween and 500 cases a day by mid-November.

But this projection no longer appears to be our fate, as the fourth wave has flattened out in Manitoba over the past seven days.

After peaking on Friday at 112 cases per day, the seven-day average count has sunk back below the 100-case mark and now stands at 99.

While it's too soon to say for certain the fourth wave has reached a plateau — for that, we need a few more weeks of static or declining case counts — suddenly seeing zero growth after two explosive weeks is a very promising sign.

"There seems to be at least that trajectory changing in the right direction," Jason Kindrachuk, a University of Manitoba  microbiologist and the Canada research chair in emerging viruses, said in an interview Wednesday.

"I think people buckled down fairly well in Manitoba to try and get this under control, and hopefully this is reflective of how seriously people are taking it in areas where we've had low vaccine uptake."

Kindrachuk said he's optimistic this isn't just a blip in the data for the past few days.

"We know things could certainly change on a dime if we give the virus room, but we just need to keep doing what we're doing," he said, crediting the province for attacking the fourth wave with a variety of tools, including restrictions tied to vaccination status.

"There is no one thing that we can do that is going to completely negate transmission. But when you start layering … non-pharmaceutical interventions and distancing and vaccination and early testing, all those things help with us getting this under control, and we're seeing that in real time."

The flattening of case counts is evident in four out of five of Manitoba's health regions. Infection rates are falling everywhere except in the Northern Health Region, where there are outbreaks in Norway House, Mathias Colomb Cree Nation and, to a lesser extent, Shamattawa.

The immense distance between communities in northern Manitoba precludes the need for additional pandemic restrictions, Dr. Jazz Atwal, the province's deputy chief public health officer, said during a Tuesday news briefing.

The only regional restrictions in Manitoba have been applied to Southern Health, where the population density is higher, vaccination rates lag behind the provincial average and public opposition to public health measures has been more vocal.

Yet case counts are starting to recede in that region, which has given up its COVID hot spot status to the north.

Manitoba's health regions have a wide spread of infection rates.

Compared to Winnipeg, which has among the lowest infection rates in Canada, the rate is double in the Interlake-Eastern health region, triple in Prairie Mountain Health and five times higher in Southern Health.

The infection rate in Northern Health is roughly 10 times that of Winnipeg, but the small population in the region skews the data.

Province keeping some stats under wraps

These rates are easy to calculate by comparing the population of a health region with the number of COVID cases it reports over the course of a week. Health Canada actually posts this information on its website every day.

Nonetheless, Manitoba keeps a parallel statistic under wraps.

Nineteen months into the pandemic, Manitoba Public Health continues to keep the test-positivity rates for every health region except Winnipeg under wraps.

"Data has to be interpreted properly," Atwal said Tuesday about a measure that can be calculated by dividing the number of new COVID-19 cases by the number of tests in a region in a given timeframe.

"If we feel that it's important for the public to be aware of these numbers at a smaller regional level, then that's something that we will look at providing," he said, suggesting the decision to keep this measure hidden from view has more to do with communications than science or statistics.

"From a public health perspective, we always don't want to ostracize certain areas or certain communities or certain groups of people, so you want to be careful about that."

After several weeks where Southern Health served as the engine for Manitoba's fourth wave, it would be fair to suggest it's a little late to be shielding its 211,896 residents from scorn.

Nobody will be happier to see the downslope of the fourth wave than people in Southern Health, who've already borne the brunt of fourth-wave infections, hospitalizations and deaths.