Deadliest month: New Brunswick ends January with a record 78 deaths related to COVID

New Brunswick closed the door on its grimmest month of the pandemic Monday, with five new COVID 19-related deaths.

It pushed the number of people lost to the virus in the province in January to 78, a new single-month record in Atlantic Canada. It broke the region's old record of 58, which was also set by New Brunswick in October.

"We realize we have had a high number of deaths in recent months,"  Premier Blaine Higgs acknowledged last week. "Especially compared to previous waves."

All provinces have been coping with a wave of COVID-related deaths after being inundated with new cases caused by the highly transmissible Omicron variant.

Health experts in Ontario told CBC News last week the sheer volume of cases is behind rising death tolls there.

"We're seeing scales of infection that we have not seen in the entire epidemic to date," said Tara Moriarty, an infectious disease researcher and associate professor at the University of Toronto. 

"There are going to be a lot of deaths, even if the virus is half as severe [as previous variants]."

Dr. Jerome Leis, medical director of infection prevention and control at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto,  agreed.

The Omicron variant "has likely infected more people in five weeks than all of the rest of the pandemic combined," he said.

"By virtue of so many infections, even a milder severity will translate into a significant number of hospitalizations and deaths, and that's what we're seeing now."

The problem was even more severe in New Brunswick last month.

Ontario recorded 1,250 COVID-related deaths in January, a rate of 8.6 per 100,000 Ontario residents. New Brunswick posted a rate of 9.8 deaths per 100,000, nearly 17 per cent higher.  

Once a rare occurrence in New Brunswick, deaths related to COVID-19 have become increasingly common, tracking at per capita levels higher than the national average in three of the last four months.

It's been a difficult development to fully explain in a province that, as recently as last summer, had one of the lowest death rates from the virus in the world.

Last week, Higgs and New Brunswick's Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Jennifer Russell pointed to a number of possible factors leading to the increased death toll, including the remnants of the Delta variant, sluggish uptake of booster shots and poor health among many in the province. 

"In New Brunswick we have an aging population," said Russell.

"We have a population that has chronic medical conditions at a higher rate than other jurisdictions. So those two things combined means that we will see probably a higher number of deaths."

Those are viable suspects. New Brunswick is Canada's second-oldest province with a median age of 46.2, and according to Statistics Canada it also has the third highest incidence of obesity among adults at 35.3 per cent.

But those numbers are not significantly different from the rest of the Atlantic provinces, which in January recorded fewer COVID-related deaths than New Brunswick as a group despite having double the population.

Another potential explanation is that New Brunswick had a much larger struggle in the fall with COVID's Delta variant than neighbouring provinces.

The New Brunswick Health Department does not have definitive numbers but in an email Monday, communications director Bruce Macfarlane said 26 per cent of COVID-related deaths in January "where sequencing results are available" were found to be caused by the Delta variant.

It is a factor that Higgs also pointed to last week.

"When the Omicron wave began, we still had a significant amount of the Delta variant in the province," he said.  

"We know that Delta had more severe symptoms and a higher death rate than Omicron."

New Brunswick was the ninth province to record its first COVID-related death in June 2020 and during the first 18 months of the pandemic accounted for just one in every 585 virus fatalities in Canada.

Since September, it has accounted for one in every 35 Canadian deaths, a deterioration that began after the province loosened health restrictions prematurely in August.