With supporting data under wraps, Heather Stefanson's 1st reopening plan becomes a matter of trust

When Brian Pallister served as premier, Manitoba's Progressive Conservative government backed up every decision to loosen pandemic restrictions with hard data showing it was safe to do so.

There were no new cases of COVID-19 anywhere in Manitoba on April 28, 2020, when Pallister announced sweeping first-wave restrictions would be lifted.

The provincial COVID test-positivity rate had just dipped below 10 per cent on Jan. 23, 2021, when the former premier made a very modest tweak to the tough restrictions that flattened out the deadly second wave.

The three-stage reopening plan Pallister unveiled on June 10, 2021, was tied to vaccination targets and later backed up with dwindling case counts and hospital admissions.

The sometimes prickly former premier can be credited for exercising a lot of caution before he pulled the plug on COVID restrictions. If anything, Pallister did his homework.

It is not clear whether his successor has done her own. Premier Heather Stefanson intends to loosen up restrictions on the basis of hard data only she and other members of her government have seen.

"We are seeing some positive trends in the data throughout the province, indicating that COVID-19 is starting to stabilize in our province," Stefanson said Thursday when she announced some pandemic restrictions will be lifted Tuesday and all will disappear some time this spring.

The data she referenced has not been made public. It is entirely possible she is correct, but without publishing this data and allowing it to be scrutinized in some fashion, Stefanson is effectively asking all Manitobans to simply trust that it is now safe to open up.

The data that is public is not encouraging. Manitoba has Canada's second-highest COVID death rate: 3.5 deaths per 100,000 people over the past week. Only Quebec has a worse record, but the trending indicates Manitoba will soon become the national leader when it comes to COVID deaths.

Stefanson suggested some other provinces may not be counting all their COVID deaths. Even if that is true, in hard numbers, we have been losing 7.4 people to COVID every day over the past week.

High COVID hospitalizations, redefined 

Manitoba also has the highest COVID-19 hospitalization rate in Canada. There are 54 COVID patients in a hospital bed for every 100,000 Manitobans.

In hard numbers, a pandemic-record 744 Manitobans were in hospital with COVID-19 on Wednesday, including 54 getting intensive care.

Dr. Brent Roussin, the chief provincial public health officer, said the hospitalization number is not as worrisome as it sounds. He said about 60 per cent of these patients have simply contracted COVID and have been hospitalized for other reasons.

Roussin also said roughly 70 per cent of COVID patients in ICU are there because of COVID. The levelling off of those ICU cases, he said, is one reason he now believes the fourth wave of the pandemic has finally levelled off in Manitoba.

"Based on from what we're seeing — things like hospital admissions and case reports, looking at absenteeism rates from different sectors, we do see it's very likely that we've hit a peak in Manitoba for case generation," Roussin said Thursday.

Those absenteeism rates are not available to the public in real time. Neither is the wastewater-monitoring data the province has had to rely on more closely since the number of Omicron cases vastly exceeded the capacity to administer PCR tests.

Roussin said he is relying on modelling he has not presented to the public in any detail beyond some slide projections presented last week.

"We redid those models and they show us the same thing this week that we've very likely peaked in cases, very likely peaked in hospital admissions and are either peaking or peaking soon regarding admissions to ICU," he said.

He did not present these updated models on Wednesday or show reporters how loosening up restrictions will affect future hospitalizations or COVID-19 deaths.

Skepticism on the rise

For the first time, Roussin has opposition politicians questioning his conclusions. Up until this week, they have deferred to his expertise.

"They're talking about cases dropping when they're not really measuring cases any more," Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont said.

"I feel like when you reopen at a time when hospitalizations continue to climb, that it makes it likely that you're not actually going to be at the peak yet," said NDP Leader Wab Kinew.

And it's not just laypeople questioning Roussin, either.

"It seems a bit premature to be on a path to reopen things, particularly as we've lost all situational awareness when it comes to knowing where our cases are coming from, who is most affected, and what the transmission chains are," said University of Manitoba epidemiologist Souradet Shaw. 

"Hospitalizations are at an all-time high, and ICUs have not yet peaked, so the timing is curious."

It may very well be that Roussin is correct and he simply does not want to share the data with the populace. That doesn't go long way in establishing trust, but it's irrelevant,

Of greater significance is the fact that no matter how you classify COVID patients, there are still so many of them in hospital, tens of thousands of non-COVID patients are going without surgeries and diagnostic procedures because doctors, nurses and other staff are devoted to COVID care.

Nobody from Shared Health was present on Wednesday to say what they thought about easing restrictions. Roussin, who spent the first 22 months of the pandemic insisting the ultimate goal of pandemic management is to protect the health-care system, now says hospitals are just one facet of health care.

"We have a much broader responsibility to the overall health of Manitobans," he said.

As well, Wednesday also saw this government do something it has never done before during the pandemic: Give the virus a deadline to stop circulating around the province.

Stefanson said she expects all restrictions to disappear by the spring.

University of Manitoba virologist Jason Kindrachuk suggested that is folly.

"The virus doesn't care what our timetable is. We have to appreciate this isn't some sort of conscious organism that we're dealing with," he said.

"A virus changes and mutates. We've dealt with a number of variants that have emerged. Certainly we can't predict what the next variant is going to look like."

No one is suggesting restrictions continue in perpetuity. It is fair, however, for Manitobans to demand that decisions about lifting or imposing them are based on actual data.