Is COVID over? York Region's medical officer of health talks about about the pandemic now and the road ahead

Yorkregion.com
March 3, 2023

Is this it? Pandemic’s D-Day? COVID-19 is kaput?

Can we all, finally, get back to normal?

York Region Public Health announced Feb. 28 it was sending its last weekly COVID-19 update.

Since March 2020, the region has provided regular updates to media and the public providing information about the status of cases and details of fatalities, vaccines, outbreaks and hospitalizations.

Now, after three years, the updates have stopped.

We spoke with Dr. Barry Pakes, the region’s medical officer of health, to find out what that means.

Is it time to celebrate? The pandemic’s over?

It’s more that we are turning the corner from pandemic toward endemic.

It doesn’t mean COVID has disappeared. Our wastewater and other indicators are reasonably low, but we are still seeing more than 30 people in our local hospitals (and provincially 500 to 1000 in-patients) at any given time. That’s dramatically reduced, and it’s receded from public eye, but the impact of COVID-19 is still there.

Can we at least get back to normal?

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Consider it ‘the new normal’, where most of us have got used to this, it but in no way are we back to the way we were before.

We’re just not all reading the papers every day about it and there aren’t the rapid new changes which have been the hallmark of a pandemic, the acute alertness and anxiety and changes of behaviour.

There continues to be at least a couple of COVID-related deaths a week in York Region, which some frame as ‘those are old people, they’d die anyway’, which is certainly not acceptable thinking. Our goal in health care is to prevent any preventable death and these deaths are all preventable.

So how are we supposed to behave now?

We still do need to think about protecting those who are vulnerable.

Masks in health care facilities will continue and, potentially, masking every respiratory season in the fall.

You'll want to mask if you’re in an environment with people who are older and at risk, or a premature child, for example.

There’s still considerable community transmission right now, so make sure you’ve been vaccinated in the last six months.

Will we need to keep getting boosters?

People who got their bivalent boosters last September may be approaching the sixth month mark and worried about waning. My hope is transmission will ease up into spring and over spring/summer, and in the fall we will re-evaluate.

We’ll also be watching in the next couple of weeks or months, looking at the data globally, to determine what we need to do next.

Are Rapid Antigen Tests going to continue to be available -- and do we even care about testing anymore?

I haven’t heard about anyone having trouble getting them in York Region but testing positive or not doe not make a huge difference in terms of our guidance: if you’re symptomatic, in any way, stay home, or at least mask.

That said, high-level health leaders and organizations are still pleading with people to test, especially if they’re in health care or with vulnerable people.

COVID is still not a benign cold. It can be deadly.

Do you see another nasty respiratory season ahead for us in the fall?

A number of things happened this year that were unusual.

Of course COVID was still there, we had this big burden of RSVs and the tragic number of children very ill in hospital, and influenza killed many people, filled up hospitals and started earlier in the season.

There’s nothing typical about the past three years, but we do have new tools now.

We are testing the wastewater and clinical testing and as long as that’s kept up, we will have early enough warning to inform what we do in the fall.

We’re just going to have to stay tuned and we’ll keep you updated.

York Region will continue to publish its COVID-19 interactive dashboard. Visit at york.ca/covid19data