Modelling group stymied by B.C. data issues as experts warn of COVID-19 hospital crunch

As a growing number of British Columbians are hospitalized with COVID-19, the stream of pandemic data from the government has dried up to the point that some of the most trusted analysts in the province say they'll need to largely give up their work.

The B.C. COVID-19 modelling group, comprised of professors from the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University as well as independent data scientists, mathematicians and other experts, has served a watchdog role by scrutinizing government policies and their impact on the pandemic’s trajectory, as well as warning the public about possible issues. Now, they say they can no longer do that work properly. 

“Definitions have changed and aren't really comparable through time, the data we get is quite out of date at this point since we only get it on a weekly interval, and even then it's revisionary,” explained one of the group’s data scientists, Jens Von Bermann.

“Given all the lags, it's hard to do anything useful, and I think at this point … we just can't do predictions anymore for B.C. We'll still try to look at what we can say about where we're at broadly."

Earlier this month the provincial government announced it would no longer provide daily COVID-19 data, moving to weekly disclosure instead. CTV News has heard from frontline health-care workers, public health experts and scientists frustrated at a “need to know” approach to public information they describe as paternalistic and geared at controlling the message to the public. 

The NDP government has faced repeated criticism in this vein from the start of the pandemic, with other provinces making much more information available to the public months earlier than in B.C., where disclosure sometimes happened only after information leaks.

HOSPITAL WARNING SIGNS NOT OBVIOUS ANYMORE

One of the most vocal critics of the government’s response to the pandemic pointed out the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 has grown to levels on par with the Delta wave, but the public is largely unaware.

"B.C.'s public health advice is highly disconnected from the epidemiological situation, or at least from what we know about that situation," said Damien Contandriopoulos, a public health researcher and professor at the University of Victoria.

“Restaurants are full, people are maskless, no masks in schools – so we are in a weird place in terms of the COVID situation because we behave, as a society, as if COVID does not exist anymore, but our health-care system is really under huge amount of stress because of COVID."

The provincial health officer declared all mandatory public health measures would be optional in early April, and has not spoken publicly on the pandemic despite rising cases of COVID-19 in hospitals and concerns immunity from vaccines may be waning as people report multiple infections of the virus.

“The pressure our hospital system is under is way more than it can sustain in the long run,” said Contandriopoulos. “So what's the plan?"

WIDESPREAD DATA ISSUES IN CANADIAN HEALTH CARE

In a recent nationwide comparison of COVID-19 infections in health-care workers, the Canadian Institute for Health Information noted that British Columbia provided the most outdated information: it is current as of late October, compared to January for most provinces. 

CTV News asked the head of the Health Workforce Information Team whether provincial officials had been lax in providing data to the agency tasked with compiling healthcare data from the country’s many health authorities, which they said was not the case.

"All the provinces have been very cooperative, including B.C.,” said Lynn McNeely. “Sometimes it's just their own data collection practices in the provinces and how the information funnels up. We like to get the same reporting period.”

When asked whether any provinces did an exceptionally good job at collecting and processing information related to COVID-19, McNeely suggested everyone has work to do and there are challenges they’re working on, with long-term implications for our understanding of the impact the virus has had Canadians’ health and various aspects of the health-care system.

"(Data collection issues are) not specific to B.C., it's an issue that's largely felt across the country and a lot of ministries are turning their attention to the granularity of the data and how to move it so it's available for use," she said.

“There are definitely are data gaps and some of that onus falls on CIHI too and we'll be updating our data standard so we can answer more questions."