COVID-19 in B.C.: How to track cases in the Omicron wave

For much of this pandemic, tracking daily COVID-19 numbers was a tool for health officials and the public to understand how the coronavirus was affecting our communities.

Now that Omicron cases have exploded in British Columbia and jurisdictions across the world, the daily case count is no longer a viable source.

“We’re flying blind, with respect to the numbers of cases in the province,” said Dr. Sally Otto, a member of the independent BC COVID-19 Modelling Group. Otto is also Canada’s research chair in theoretical and experimental evolution at the University of British Columbia.

The latest numbers from the province on Friday showed there are currently 33,184 active, lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19 in B.C., an all-time high since the pandemic began.

According to the latest report from the modelling group, the active number of cases is likely around 250,000. 

“I would suspect that five per cent of the population is actively infected with Omicron right now in B.C.,” said Otto.

Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry urged British Columbians at a news conference on Dec. 24 to only go to a testing centre if they have symptoms, as the province has reached its capacity for conducting PCR tests.

B.C. is prioritizing those tests for people at greater risk of complications from the virus, specifically those over age 65, those with weakened immune symptoms and people experiencing severe symptoms.

PCR tests are also being reserved for frontline health-care workers, who must have certainty that their symptoms are not COVID-19 in order to continue working in B.C.’s stretched health-care system.

“The reason we are only seeing 3,000, 4,000 cases reported a day is because we’ve capped the number of people we are testing,” said Otto.

The BC COVID-19 Modelling Group has been forced to look for alternative sources of information to track the number of infections in the province, which Otto says is important for people to know.

“It matters that we have a sense of those numbers because what you do in your daily life, the risks you take, depend a lot on the number of cases in your community,” said Otto.

Otto and her team are starting to track wastewater in the Lower Mainland again. Wastewater can be an early warning signal for COVID-19 in a community and fill the gaps when testing is over capacity.

“It helps us know when we are peaking and when the virus count is coming down,” said Otto.

Otto is also asking business owners or managers who have staff off work because of COVID-19 to reach out to her team.

“If you are running a business and have information about the number of staff on sick leave, send the data our way,” she said. “We can use information like that to say, ‘Here is the burden of disease across the month of January.’”

Health experts tell CTV News the good news about the Omicron wave is that the curve will trend down as quickly as it has gone up. Otto expects the province will be able to give a PCR test to anyone feeling symptoms again by February.