Ontario’s official data is short dozens of recent COVID-19 deaths. ‘High-tech and public health are not synonymous’
At Wednesday afternoon news conference, Ontario's associate chief medical officer of health presented the latest COVID-19 numbers: the province had 2,392 confirmed cases, including 37 dead.
Those numbers, Dr. Barbara Yaffe cautioned the watching public, may be out of date. She explained: the province relies on its 34 local public health units to submit the data, which was retrieved the previous afternoon.
Minutes later, a journalist pointed out that those health units were, at that moment in news releases and on their websites, publicly reporting more than 65 dead. Why such a large difference, CTV's Scott Lightfoot asked?
"I am kind of surprised at that discrepancy, I have to say," Yaffe responded, adding that the province doesn't "at this moment have a better way" to report the numbers.
Hours later at 5 p.m., after more health units had posted their day's findings, the province's official Wednesday total of 37 was off by at least 45 publicly reported COVID-19 deaths, according to the Star's count - a more than 100 per cent difference.
The conflicting information coming from the province's health-care authorities is confusing to patients, doctors, epidemiologists and the general public who rely on health officials to tell them exactly how the COVID-19 epidemic is spreading, said experts who spoke to the Star.
At the news conference, Yaffe said she speaks regularly with the public health units' medical officers of health about the importance of putting the data into the provincial database as soon as possible.
When asked if the province had any plan to make its numbers more current, Yaffe said: "it's a big challenge and we're working on it constantly."
"I think that part of it will be adding some resources to the local health units to do more intensive contact follow-up and more timely data entry," she said.
Inputting data into the province's reporting system may not be the top priority for the local units in the middle of a crisis, she said, "but it is important so that we can be as up-to-date as possible and as transparent as possible, and that's what we all want."
Hayley Chazan, a spokesperson for Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott, said the province is providing $100 million in additional investments for public health units to support COVID-19 monitoring and testing.
Yaffe and Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. David Williams "continue to have conversations with public health units about the importance of submitting data related to COVID-19 cases into Ontario's Integrated Public Health Information System," she said.
The Star maintains a daily tally of public reports from all 34 regional public health units in the province. As of Wednesday evening, they were reporting 2,806 confirmed or probable COVID-19 cases, including 82 deaths.
According to David Fisman, an epidemiologist with the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, the biggest problem with the province's data being out of date is that it's confusing to the public - no small thing amid a crisis.
A big jump in deaths, like the Star's count reveals, is to be expected in the exponential phase of an epidemic, he said, especially with several ongoing outbreaks at Ontario nursing homes.
"The fact that deaths doubled " that seems like an important thing to know," he said. If Ontarians aren't getting up-to-date information as the case counts grow, he said, "how are you going to get people to stay in their house for two months?"
As for what explains the large gap between the province's data and what's publicly available from the health units, Fisman said that "may just be the nature of the beast" that is Ontario's low-tech health reporting system.
"High-tech and public health are not synonymous," he said.
Dr. Anna Banerji, also a professor at the Dalla Lana school, said incomplete death numbers released by the province don't give health-care workers an accurate sense of the impact of the virus.
"It can make people think it's better or worse than the actual state," she said, noting that a delay of one or two days is sometimes part of the process of gathering the data. "Longer than that, I think it could impact our understanding of what's going on, what the actual situation on the ground is."
Kenyon Wallace is a Toronto-based investigative reporter. Follow him on Twitter: @KenyonWallace or reach him via email: kwallace@thestar.ca
Ed Tubb is an assignment editor and a contributor focused on crime and justice. He is based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @edtubb