York Region’s medical officer says he was wrong about avoiding third COVID-19 wave

Theglobeandmail.com
April 12, 2021
Jeff Gray

York Region’s medical officer of health, who just over a month ago predicted that his area would escape a third wave of COVID-19, now says his earlier optimistic forecast was based on receiving more vaccines to outrun the virus’s new, more contagious variants.

Karim Kurji has frequently stood apart from his peers in neighbouring Toronto and Peel Region, expressing skepticism over the effectiveness of lockdowns and arguing that more businesses should be allowed to reopen.

Until the province’s latest moves to bring in a stay-at-home order, he managed to keep his sprawling health district north of Toronto under a looser level of restrictions, allowing restaurants to reopen with capacity limits.

And in early March, Dr. Kurji told The Globe and Mail that new and more contagious variants of the virus were not spreading as fast as anticipated. While cases would likely rise again, he said that he didn’t believe York would see the “explosive growth” of a third wave.

It didn’t work out that way. Ontario registered 4,227 new infections on Friday, with York Region responsible for 532 cases -- well past the area’s January high-water mark in the second wave. The province’s hospitals warned that intensive-care units were reaching a breaking point.

In an interview on Friday, Dr. Kurji said that in March he believed the vaccine rollout would head off any major increase in cases -- but that a lack of supply slowed progress.

“I agree we are definitely in the third wave,” he said. “But when we were looking at the data at that time, I wasn’t that convinced that we were going to get into a third wave. And I’ve always found that predicting anything seems to be really difficult.”

Dr. Kurji says he supports the province’s new stay-at-home order, which has shut restaurants and non-essential retail to in-person customers for four weeks. Similar measures appeared to work at the height of the second wave in January, he said.

But he also said that he remains skeptical of the effect of the province’s system of colour-coded lockdown levels. He says the epidemic curves in Toronto and Peel, which had tougher restrictions in the grey or “lockdown zone,” were not much different than York’s, which had stayed in the less-restrictive red zone. His strategy was to instead vigorously enforce pandemic rules and launch inspection blitzes of businesses.

Dr. Kurji said there are reasons for optimism, with the new focus on vaccinating younger people in community hot spots. In York Region, he said, the new variants appear to have plateaued at 50 to 60 per cent of infections, and the time they take to double has increased to 12 days, meaning they are moving more slowly. It’s different than in the rest of the province, he said, where the variants are doubling every nine days.

He said the new vaccination push should start to make a dent in case counts within two to four weeks. Part of the problem, he said, was that vaccinations so far have focused on older people, while younger people have been transmitting the new variants.

“We had to move from what I like to call a defensive strategy, to protect older and vulnerable folks, to the offensive strategy, which is really trying to put out the fires that are raging,” Dr. Kurji said.

Starting on Monday, mobile teams will begin vaccinating workers aged 18 and up at 14 targeted manufacturing plants in York Region, which were chosen based on outbreak data. Dr. Kurji said many of the employees who will get the shot actually live in Toronto or Peel. Vaccinations at clinics in York Region for those living in certain hot spots and aged 45 to 59 are already under way.

He acknowledged that York Region’s hospitals were under immense stress, and have been accepting overflow patients from other areas, including Toronto and Peel. But he said the number of admissions for cases actually originating in York Region was holding steady, and the percentage of York Region residents ending up in ICUs had declined.