After N.B.'s deadliest year, COVID-related strokes and heart attacks are in the spotlight

Haley Jones is 32 and struggling with cardiac problems that developed after she came down with COVID-19 last December.

"My heart rate was going up as high as 200.  I was very short of breath. I couldn't walk and talk at the same time," said the stay-at-home mother of three from her home in Oromocto, N.B.

Jones has been to the emergency room twice with heart trouble since her COVID infection and was eventually diagnosed with supraventricular tachycardias. It's an "irregularly fast or erratic heartbeat that affects the heart's upper chambers," according to an online explanation by the Mayo Clinic.

Jones is on medicine to slow her heart rate and she is wait-listed for an appointment at the New Brunswick Heart Centre for a procedure to restore her heart's normal rhythm.

She feels the ordeal may help explain why New Brunswick residents have been dying in record numbers over the past year. 

"I think that COVID and the consequences of a COVID infection are definitely playing a bigger part than you think," said Jones.

"I'm 32 years old and I'm taking heart medication now."

Statistics Canada last week published what are called "provisional" mortality counts for New Brunswick, which estimated 9,288 people died in the province through 2022.

If confirmed, the number will be a record for the province, obliterating the previous high set in 2021 by a stunning 1,179 deaths.

COVID's full impact still not understood: epidemiologist

New Brunswick has never experienced an increase in death counts anywhere near that size in a single year. Prior to the pandemic, the closest was a war time increase of 510 in 1945.

COVID-19 is known to be directly responsible for about a third of the 2022 increase. Officially, New Brunswick recorded 580 COVID deaths that year which was 421 more than in 2021. 

But some health experts are increasingly convinced the virus is taking a larger toll on people than direct COVID death counts alone reveal. And they believe significantly elevated fatality levels like New Brunswick's are credible evidence of that.

Colin Furness is an infection control epidemiologist and assistant professor at the University of Toronto who has tracked the pandemic's progress in New Brunswick since 2020.

In an interview with CBC:Shift earlier this month, Furness said COVID deaths and infections alone won't reflect the true extent of the damage the virus can cause.

It is a "very 2020, 2021 way to look at this pandemic" said Furness.

Researchers have documented since 2020 that COVID causes vascular damage in some infected people and Furness contends provinces like New Brunswick need to study vascular-related deaths more closely, not just COVID deaths, to understand the virus's full body count. 

"We should actually not be looking at (COVID) deaths per week," said Furness. 

"We should be looking at changes in population life expectancy. We should be looking at rates of heart attack and stroke."

Department is not drawing conclusions

New Brunswick's Department of Health is aware of the record 2022 death estimate but it has no theories about a cause — and isn't prepared to draw any broad conclusions about what it means.

"It wouldn't be prudent to link the analysis on excess deaths to specific medical conditions," wrote department communications officer Sean Hatchard in an email to CBC News.

"Excess deaths could be connected to several factors, including changing demographics and the COVID-19 pandemic, although further analysis will be needed."

Because the death count is a provisional estimate and does not include comprehensive information on causes of death, the province says it is not possible to know exactly what might be causing such a large number.

Hatchard notes that earlier pandemic death estimates for New Brunswick by Statistics Canada were unreliable and subject to significant revisions, although that was caused mostly by spotty reporting of deaths by the province to Statistics Canada that has largely been resolved.

New Brunswick did add to its population in 2022 which may have affected numbers, but new arrivals were a much younger demographic than current residents, and not considered likely to add much to death totals in their first year.

And even if they did, New Brunswick's 2022 population averaged three per cent more than 2021, well below the 14.5 per cent increase in deaths.  

Housing insecurity and rough living, mental illness and addiction issues are also additional non-COVID suspects for the increase in fatalities but Furness believes most will inevitably be found to be COVID-related — and the sooner that is understood the better.  

"There's a lot of effort to attribute it to something other than COVID but without success," he said of elevated death counts all over North America.

"We kind of have a big question mark around why are we seeing more stroke and heart attack deaths and so those are the kinds of numbers I think we should be looking at."

Haley Jones agrees with that. 

Her heart problems have convinced her COVID remains a threat and she's disappointed the province isn't sounding alarms about the spike in provincial deaths as a way to warn people to be more careful.

"I think that they are doing the best they can to not tell us how many people are dying," said Jones.