The new COVID data frontier: Making evidence-based decisions in an era with less evidence – CBC

Manitobans have been told to assess the COVID-19 risk for themselves, albeit with fewer tools to do so

Mar 27, 2022

Two years into the pandemic, Manitoba has put an end to the daily disclosure of COVID-19 data. On Friday, public health updated its familiar COVID cases and risk dashboard for the final time and now plans to delete the page from the provincial website.

For some Manitobans, checking that dashboard was part of a daily ritual, especially in the days when the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and the percentage of tests coming back positive served as reliable indicators about the state of the pandemic.

Those measures ceased to be relevant by the end of 2021, when the highly transmissable Omicron variant overwhelmed the province’s ability to test the populace for COVID.

By the first week of January, COVID hospitalizations, COVID ICU cases and COVID deaths were the only useful numbers on that page, even though they are what epidemiologists call lagging indicators: Figures that tell us something about the way COVID was spreading several weeks in the past.

The new COVID data frontier: Making evidence-based decisions in an era with less evidence – CBC

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