Dylan Lubao
Canada’s official COVID-19 death toll has surpassed 40,000 amid a sixth wave of infections and deaths which is devastating working class families across the country. Governments at the provincial and federal level, irrespective of their political affiliation, have embraced mass infection as a positive good.
In an article marking the grim milestone, Global News acknowledged that the “true death toll could be thousands higher,” since “two-thirds of all COVID-19 deaths may have been missed.” If this is the case, Canada’s real death toll amounts to a staggering 120,000 people, nearly equivalent to the United States staggering death toll of 1 million on a per capita basis.
Government officials, including Theresa Tam, the Liberal-appointed Chief Medical Health Officer of Canada, have been quick to announce that the current wave, fueled by the highly transmissible BA.2 Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is “waning.” Figures show that hospitalizations and deaths are on the decline, although these numbers are both a significant undercount and highly suspect. Governments across the country stopped widespread public testing and contact tracing at the beginning of January.
From a sixth wave peak of around 7,000 at the end of April, hospitalizations have fallen gradually to around 5,800 nationwide by mid May, still higher than any other wave except the recent December/January surge. The seven-day rolling average of daily deaths has decreased from a peak of 82 on April 25 to 69 on May 10. Although the majority of provinces and territories show declining or stagnant hospitalizations and deaths, British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba continue to see increases in both.
These figures make clear that hundreds more deaths will be recorded in the coming weeks. A study published May 16 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that 11 percent of all patients hospitalized with COVID-19 die or are readmitted within a 30-day period. At the current level of 6,300 hospitalizations, 11 percent equates to some 700 people.
Infectious disease researcher Dr. Tara Moriarty at the University of Toronto has noted that the official government figures, as devastating as they are, are wildly inaccurate. Many provincial governments have ended daily pandemic reports and shunted them off to anemic weekly information dumps.
According to her projections, based on data from April 20, near the peak of the current sixth wave, a staggering 78 percent of the population has been infected with Omicron in Alberta, 77 percent in Manitoba, and 79 percent in Saskatchewan. New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador are close behind at 65 percent and 63 percent of the population, respectively. None of the provinces show infection percentages below 40 percent.
Dr. Moriarty estimates that 63,639 Canadians were infected on April 20, compared to the official government count of 7,972. This amounts to an undercount in the official figures of roughly 87 percent. She estimates that April 20 saw 3,818 cases of Long COVID, which often produces debilitating long-term illness even after initial symptoms subside.
Among the most alarming of Dr. Moriarty’s projections is the ratio of future COVID-19 deaths to other causes of death. Assuming that governments persist with their herd immunity policy of no public health measures, there will be one COVID-19 death for every three cancer deaths. One person will die of COVID-19 for every death due to heart disease. COVID-19 will kill over seven times more people each year than the influenza virus, dispelling the absurd claim that the coronavirus is no worse than the flu.
What the federal and provincial governments have effectively accomplished over the past two years is the introduction of COVID-19 as the third leading cause of death, whittling down ranks of the elderly, the medically vulnerable, and even younger and healthier individuals. Every major political party has blood on its hands, as well as the union bureaucracies, which have not once lifted a finger to protect their members, their families, or the broader population.
The sixth wave began in late March, less than a month after the peak of the fifth wave, which was triggered by the BA.1 Omicron variant. Even accounting for the artificially suppressed official data, the fifth and sixth waves have produced the most infections and hospitalizations by far of any stage of the pandemic. Over 6,500 lives were lost to COVID-19 in the fifth wave, approaching the colossal death tolls of the first and second waves of the pandemic, which took place before vaccines were widely available.
The scale of illness and death produced by the ruling elite’s let it rip policy during the fifth and sixth waves is immense and exposes as a lie the claim by every media outlet and major political party that the Omicron variant is “mild.” A recent Harvard study demonstrated that Omicron is intrinsically as severe as earlier strains of the virus, including the Delta variant.
In Quebec, it is estimated that one-quarter of adults and one-third of children were infected with the Omicron variant within the past five months. Contrary to Premier François Legault’s dismissal of Omicron as a mere “cold,” Quebec’s pandemic death toll in 2022 has already surpassed the 3,271 fatalities registered in 2021, with seven months left to go.
The Atlantic provinces, including New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador, have since last winter experienced their worst stages of the pandemic. Provincial governments in this region begrudgingly tolerated a strategy similar to COVID-19 elimination during the first year of the pandemic, before dismantling public health measures in late 2021 with the rollout of vaccines and in accordance with the demands of Canada’s banks and major corporations. This decision has unsurprisingly resulted in an explosion of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths.
New Brunswick, where the Progressive Conservative government took the lead among the Atlantic provinces in dropping public health measures last summer, saw its highest daily death toll on March 22 with 16 deaths. Hospitalizations have come down from a peak of 165 on February 2 but continue to hover at around 80. Since mid-September, lulls in the province’s hospitalizations and deaths have been fleeting, leading to an almost permanent surge.
The entirely expected but no less devastating impact of herd immunity policy continues to be felt outside of the morgues and funeral homes. Work absences due to illness reached record levels in April, while hospitals continue to be struck by unprecedented staff shortages, leading to backlogs for critical medical procedures that will not be fulfilled for months if not years. Seasonal flu, which was almost eliminated during the earlier stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, is now making a comeback.
For the ruling class and its political representatives, the pandemic is entirely in the rear-view mirror. All of the major press outlets have reduced their pandemic coverage to a trickle. Ontario’s ongoing provincial election campaign sees all four major parties, including the ostensibly “progressive” New Democratic Party (NDP), deliberately omitting the pandemic as a significant issue.
On May 14, Quebec became the last province to end its mask mandate. With the exception of mask mandates in a selection of high-risk settings like public transit and health care facilities, no obstacles remain to the widespread transmission of the virus.
The federal Liberal government recently ended the last of its already meager financial aid packages to workers, asserting that emergency help was no longer required. The NDP, which entered a “confidence-and-supply” agreement with Trudeau in March to keep the Liberals in power through 2025, did nothing to oppose this criminal move. With no way to compensate for lost wages if they need to shelter at home during an infection or take care of an infected child, workers will be forced to turn up to work infected or send their infected kids to schools and daycares, spreading the potentially deadly virus even more rapidly throughout the population.
