COVID-19 hospitalizations due to Omicron are vastly underreported: grassroots organization – CTV
Aug. 18, 2022
With provinces releasing less frequent data on COVID-19 three years into the pandemic, a group of volunteer experts has been releasing their own analysis of cases, highlighting a vast underreporting of hospitalizations and deaths in Canada due to the Omicron variant.
Recent figures based on this analysis show that expected hospitalizations from Omicron could be 70 per cent higher on average than what has been reported since Dec. 2, 2021, if the rest of the country reported as Quebec did.
“If each province reported in a similar fashion as Quebec, which is the gold standard in Canada for complete and timely reporting of severe COVID outcomes, then these numbers would look very different from those that have been reported,” Tara Moriarty, an infectious disease expert at the University of Toronto and the co-founder of COVID-19 Resources Canada, told CTVNews.ca on Tuesday.
