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A new Omicron wave is building, but it’s impossible to predict its severity due to a lack of data collected by the province, according to a report from British Columbia’s independent COVID-19 modeling group.

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On Tuesday, Dr. Bonnie Henry, BC’s provincial health officer, said the province has strong surveillance systems that allow policymakers to see trends and make decisions about how to respond to the pandemic. .

Henry said she expects to see an uptick in cases as restrictions are lifted, but doesn’t think that will mean a big jump in hospitalizations based on BC Center for Disease Control modeling. .

“What this predicts is that if we do the things we do, if nothing changes, then we’re going to see a much slower, smaller increase (in hospitalizations) over time over the next two months. “, Henry mentioned.

But the report released Wednesday by the independent modeling group – which includes experts in epidemiology, mathematics and data analysis from several BC universities and the private sector – indicates that hospitalizations could remain at current levels or could increase to over 1,000 at the peak of the first Omicron wave in late January.

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The province reported 329 people hospitalized Wednesday with COVID-19, a drop of two after several days of small increases.

Jens von Bergmann, a data scientist and member of the independent group, said he was not confident about the predictions of his group’s most recent report, as it relied on “poor data from Colombia. British”.

“We’re not sure about the level of immunity in the population and the contact rates and the impact that has on transmissions and hospitalizations is hard to say.”

Von Bergmann said the province could do more to improve its monitoring systems, which would help modelers make more reliable predictions and allow people to make more informed choices.

British Columbia is no longer testing suspected COVID cases unless someone is at risk of serious illness, and it recently dropped plans to collect data from the vast majority who use rapid tests. .

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“It could have evolved into something similar to Flu Watch, which is a more informal monitoring system but works relatively well for monitoring our flu season,” von Bergmann said. “That would give you an idea of ​​the population-level data on the rate of spread and that would be helpful and it’s not hard to do.”

British Columbia’s main monitoring system relies on the number of hospitalizations, but von Bergmann said his group would prefer the province to report the number of daily admissions.

He said the total number of people in hospital or in intensive care changes regularly and is a mix of people admitted a long time ago and people recently admitted.

“It’s hard to say whether admissions are increasing or not,” he said.

After the province halted contact tracing last year, it turned to sewage surveillance as a benchmark for measuring the rate of community transmission.

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On Tuesday, Henry said that was how an uptick in infections had been detected over the past week.

“With wastewater analyses, we only do it once a week. It can only be done at this frequency. It doesn’t change much over a one-day or 24-hour period.

But von Bergmann said sewage tests can produce very different results from day to day. He said results differ depending on whether it rains or if a large industrial plant discharges sewage all at once, but the province does not report water flows. He added that Omicron is known to produce less virus in the stool, but those things aren’t measured in the BC data, although they could be.

“Sewage data is difficult to interpret because a lot is going on in a sewer line,” he said.

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Henry reported that the BA. Omicron strain 2 accounts for almost 75% of all infections and this has been determined by genome sequencing. But von Bergmann said there was a delay in reporting that data and that could skew the results.

“If you have the BA Omicron. 2 growing strain but you have BA. 1 declining, then it might look like it’s flat.

Henry insists that British Columbians can trust published information.

“What we see in terms of risk doesn’t change every day,” she said. “We have to think about it over a longer period. What is my risk this week? What things do I feel comfortable doing next week? »

However, von Bergmann believes people remain vulnerable.

“People who were really trying to avoid getting COVID have a lot fewer tools to avoid getting the virus because they have a lot less information and wearing a mask is no longer necessary,” he said. declared. “People will act on the information given to them. There should be more information, given more than once a week.

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