Doctor breaks down how Canada can move on from COVID-19 in the fall
Infectious Disease Specialist Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti talks about what Canada can expect from COVID-19 in the fall and whether it's time to stop following daily COVID-19 case counts.
Video Transcript
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SUMON CHAKRABARTI: I think going forward now, we need to start shifting our perspective. I agree that, you know, talking about covid every day, daily briefings, daily case counts, you know, news about every little new variant, or a recombination virus that comes out, at this point, is just causing anxiety and preventing us from moving forward. I do think it's still important for us to monitor this stuff. And this is something that can be shouldered by the medical and scientific community like it always has been with other respiratory and other types of infections.
I think that what BC did was quite smart in reducing the number of briefings they were having. I think they've reduced it to once a week. I do think that taking away the case count is not only going to lower anxiety. It's also taking away a value at this point that's not really going to offer much information. What's much more important is following hospital utilization, such as ICU admissions and hospital capacity.
And this is something that can be publicly available. But it doesn't necessarily need to be blared on the airwaves every single day. And all of these things, shifting our perspective to living safely with the virus, something that the virus has afforded us the ability to do, is what we need to do in the coming weeks to months, so we can move to the next post-pandemic stage here in Ontario in Canada.
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I think that when we mentioned things like waves or a resurgence, what's happened in the past year and a half, for the public that's synonymous with lockdowns and, you know, other aspects that are very negative. We should now start to normalize what happened. We know naturally in the fall months, cases of respiratory illness increase. That is something that we have dealt with every year, even before covid. And it's not something that's a catastrophe.
So I think, certainly, different messaging around what we expect to see in fall time is needed. And staying away from terms like fourth wave or resurgence or, you know, a catastrophe that's about to come because it's not going to be-- the disease has been fundamentally changed with vaccination. And that's the kind of messaging we should be going-- we should be portraying going forward. And I really do think that we can live with this as an endemic virus and to move on with our lives, just like we do with things like influenza, rhinovirus, and other things that cause similar illnesses.
