Serological testing suggests nearly half of Canadians and two-thirds of children under 10 have had COVID-19

Malcolm Fiedler & Roger Jordan

Serological testing by the British Columbia Centres for Disease Control (BC CDC) and Life Labs revealed that over 40 percent of the province’s population tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies in March. This staggering figure, up from 10 percent during a previous study in October, underscores how the more infectious Omicron variant and the ruling elite’s deliberate policy of letting the virus run rampant produced mass infection on an unprecedented scale.

Perhaps the most concerning finding was the widespread infection of children. It found that over 60 percent of children surveyed tested positive for COVID antibodies, discrediting the often repeated lie that schools aren’t drivers of transmission. This lie, coupled with fraudulent claims that children are less likely to get infected, was used to keep schools open through successive waves of massive infection and death over the past two years, so parents could be freed from child care responsibilities and forced to work pumping out profits for big business.

August 2021 protest against the Alberta UCP government's attempt to scrap virtually all anti-COVID measures, an action that made the province the centre of Canada's fourth wave of the pandemic. (Twitter)

British Columbia, together with Alberta and Manitoba, are the three provinces with the highest serological test positivity rates, according to separate figures released last month by the Canadian Blood Service and Canada’s COVID-19 Immunity Task Force. The data showed that over 36 percent of young people aged 17 to 24 had had a COVID-19 infection by the end of February. These figures are revealing in that they show how British Columbia, a province governed by the supposedly “left” NDP, and Alberta, led by hard-right Premier Jason Kenney, who as late as June 2020 was describing COVID-19 as “the flu,” have pursued similar ruthless policies of mass infection and death throughout the pandemic.

Given the continuing rampant spread of the virus in the two months since these figures were gathered, it is reasonable to assume that the true rate of infection is now approaching 50 percent. As Danuta Skowronski, an epidemiologist at the BC CDC who led its research, told CBC in late April, “It’s about one in two, almost, of our population that have had evidence of infection.”

Official figures from Ontario suggest that 40 percent of the population was infected by COVID-19 since December. Meanwhile, Quebec’s hard-right Coalition Avenir Québec government recently admitted that the initial Omicron wave infected some 3 million of the province’s 8.5 million people.

In the six months since December 1, 2021, Canada has officially recorded nearly additional 10,000 COVID-19 deaths in two waves of Omicron, bringing the total since the pandemic to more than 39,800.  

CIDRAP, an internationally renowned center for infectious diseases based in Minnesota, recently conducted a meta-analysis of 31 independent studies and found that upwards of 49 percent of COVID-19 survivors experienced persistent and lingering illness from a variety of symptoms four months after their diagnosis. Assuming that close to 19 million people in Canada, approximately half of its 38 million population, have suffered a COVID-19 infection, this study suggests that over 9 million people could have suffered, or are now suffering, from Long COVID.

This mass tragedy was not principally due to Omicron’s unprecedented infectiousness and immune-evasive capabilities. Properties the virus was able to develop only because the ruling elites of every country, outside China, refused to pursue an elimination strategy, thus allowing the virus to continue to propagate and mutate spinning off new variants.

If millions of Canadians have been infected with COVID-19 just since last December, it is above all because the federal Liberal government and its provincial counterparts have abandoned all efforts to contain the pandemic’s spread. Indeed, in Canada, as elsewhere, the advent of the more infectious Omicron variant was used to declare that attempts to stop the virus’ spread were futile.

In line with this, the devastating increase in COVID infections over the past six months and the nearly ten thousand additional needless deaths have been positively welcomed by the political establishment and its media hangers-on as part of their homicidal campaign to make COVID-19 “endemic.”

When Omicron was first detected in southern Africa in late November 2021, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau waited three weeks before bothering to address the population on what his government planned to do about it. By then, Omicron was already spreading rapidly across the country, breaking daily infection rates. Rather than investing social and financial resources to combat the looming disaster, Trudeau and the provincial premiers allowed the testing and contact tracing systems to all but collapse. As of late April, just 3.7 million infections had been officially recorded in Canada since Omicron’s advent, approximately one-fifth of the total suggested by serological research.

Following the emergence of the far-right Freedom Convoy in late January, which was incited and built up by the Conservative Party to break popular support for COVID-19 protection measures, the Trudeau government, with the support of the NDP, oversaw the implementation of the Convoy’s fascistic pandemic program in all but name. Mask mandates, test requirements, limits on social gatherings, and all other remaining public health measures were scrapped in the weeks following the occupation of downtown Ottawa by far-right thugs threatening political violence.

A critical role in facilitating this bonfire of COVID-19 regulations was played by the New Democrats and trade unions. They responded to the emergence of the Freedom Convoy by using their vast resources to block any independent protests by workers to oppose the Convoy’s fascistic agenda, instead underscoring their firm loyalty to the Canadian capitalist state. The unions applauded Trudeau’s invocation of the draconian Emergencies Act to break up the Convoy, while the NDP ensured Trudeau got a parliamentary majority to confirm and extend the Act’s enforcement. One month later, with the vast majority of COVID-19 protections already scrapped by the provinces with the approval of the federal government, the NDP concluded an alliance with the Liberals to keep Trudeau in power through June 2025.

The initial Omicron wave, which claimed close to 6,500 lives in Canada, has since given way to a sixth deadly wave of the virus. Infections and deaths have skyrocketed across the country, with many hospitals once again overwhelmed. Children’s hospitals are facing a particularly drastic crisis due to COVID-19’s ravaging of schools.

Governments at all levels are doing even less to fight the sixth wave than all previous ones. On Saturday, May 14, Quebec will become the last province to abolish its indoor mask mandate, creating a situation where essentially no pandemic public heath restrictions will remain in force anywhere in Canada.

Last Saturday, the Trudeau government, again with the support of the trade union-sponsored NDP, allowed the few remaining COVID-19 financial supports available for working people to expire. Consequently, workers will no longer receive financial aid if they need to self-isolate after a positive test or to take time off to care for an infected child or relative. As well as underscoring the indifference of the Liberal government to the well-being of working people, the decision will further accelerate COVID-19 transmission, as infected workers will be forced to choose between remaining on the job or facing increased financial distress, even ruin.