Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said the weekly reports would be generated automatically and would include the number of people who died while testing positive for the coronavirus for the past 30 days. “We will move on to a new way of reporting people who have died from COVID and look at mortality from any cause within 30 days,” Henry said at a model presentation Tuesday. “That means we will outnumber people early on.” Under BC’s current system for releasing pandemic data every day, public health teams are responsible for manually investigating each death to determine if COVID-19 was a factor. This led to some data corrections during the crisis, as teams struggled to keep up with narrow reference windows. Henry said the government would continue to work to separate coronavirus-related deaths from those who were accidentally infected with COVID-19, but the process would take longer – weeks or months, in some cases, as causes of death are confirmed through Vital Statistics. Henry said that as soon as there was information, the death toll in the province would be “updated on a rolling basis”. “This gives us a more accurate picture of the effects of all causes from COVID-19,” he added. He warned the public to expect a jump in deaths from COVID-19 early in the transition, something that happens this Thursday. The change previously announced in the weekly report has been met with reluctance and has renewed concerns about government transparency during the pandemic. BC Greens leader Sonia Furstenau criticized the province on Tuesday for offering less data at a time when the Omicron BA.2 sub-variant has already fueled increases in transmission and hospitalization. “This government is desperate to retain its narrative about managing this pandemic and is doing so by limiting testing, monitoring and reporting. They closed the community monitoring at the beginning of a sixth wave,” Furstenau said in a statement. “We have seen in other jurisdictions, such as Peterborough, Ont., For example, where data transparency and public guidance is the focus of a responsible public health body. “It is not an impossible task for this government to provide clear guidance to the public on the level of risk it faces.”
