A week ago during question period in the Nova Scotia legislature the leader of the opposition accused the Premier of delaying the monthly release of the primary care wait-list because it contained bad news. A few hours later – and about a week after the normal delivery date – the list was released. And sure enough, the news was bad. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The number of names on the \u201cNeed A Family Practice Registry\u201d increased by over 5,500 in September, a jump of five percent. But by the time the news came out late Friday the legislature had adjourned for the weekend. That conveniently provided a three-day grace period before the government has to face any questions in the legislature about a wait-list that has grown by 62 percent since August 2021, when Nova Scotians elected a PC government boasting it would be \u201claser focused on fixing health care.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whether the delayed release was due to administrative problems – as claimed by the government – or political manoeuvring is no big deal. The numbers are now in the public domain, to be wrangled over until the next batch comes out. More interesting was the attempt by Liberal leader Zach Churchill to equate last week\u2019s wait-list peekaboo with the Houston government\u2019s management of information about COVID-19. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As Churchill put it\u00a0 \u201cwhen COVID got worse, the information was reduced,\u201d a statement that is on the mark.\u00a0 Consider the time before the numbers became “worse”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then consider what happened when the death count began to accelerate through January and February,\u00a0 and the pace of media briefings featuring the Premier and Dr. Strang slowed, while the messaging changed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Living with it<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As it turned out, one approach to reducing COVID\u2019s influence on daily living was to imitate the proverbial wise monkeys. Daily reports about the \u201cevil\u201d COVID would be cancelled and replaced with weekly, less detailed reporting. And the Premier would adopt the role of the hands-over-the-mouth speechless monkey, Iwazaru. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Houston would participate in only two more COVID briefings, the last one on March 18, mainly to apologize for extending the masking mandate in schools for another month. Houston mentioned families who had lost loved ones, but did not provide the numbers which would have revealed almost 80 additional deaths since his \u201cliving with COVID\u201d announcement of Feb. 9.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Missing News <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The reduction in briefings and data would mean a lot less seeing, hearing and speaking about the evils of COVID in the news. And quality, as well as quantity, would suffer. Data has been inconsistently reported and numbers bounced around, particularly mortality figures. For example, last Friday one media outlet reported \u201c11 deaths, more than 900 cases reported this week.\u201d Should Nova Scotians have been concerned? Not too much if they went by the CBC report the following Monday, explaining that \u201cNova Scotia sees dip in COVID-19 deaths in September.\u201d But hold on – yesterday (Thursday) came news that for the week of Oct. 11-17 there were 17 COVID deaths, the most in any week since June.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reason for the conflicting messages is that last Friday\u2019s report and the one from this Thursday covered the two-week period from Oct. 4-10 and Oct. 11-17, while the Monday report was for the entire month of September. It now appears that COVID deaths in October – 28 so far – will greatly exceed those reported in September. Whether the story will be reported that way remains to be seen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As the snapshot of a week\u2019s worth of reporting illustrates, media compilations of cases, deaths and hospitalizations may be up one week and down the next. In fact, in 26 weekly reports between March 30 and Oct. 20, death counts were down 16 times and up 10 times. It\u2019s only when the numbers are added that a full picture of the overall increase emerges. Since Omicron arrived on the scene there have been 460 deaths, on top of 112 to that point. That\u2019s an increase of 411 per cent, about eight times<\/em> the national increase of around 53 per cent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Usually such a startling fact would rate a mention or two in the media, if not a headline, but I\u2019ve seen neither. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To put that increase in context, one plausible explanation for the enormous gap between Nova Scotia\u2019s and Canada\u2019s rate of increased mortality is that Nova Scotia – like the other provinces in Atlantic Canada – started from a much lower base. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A more appropriate metric would be COVID deaths per capita since the advent of Omicron, which would show Nova Scotia about seven per cent above the national rate. Based on the federal government\u2019s epidemiology update of Oct. 14, COVID deaths in Nova Scotia since December were 43.3 per 100,000 population versus 40.4\/100,000 nationally. That\u2019s a far cry from the numbers experienced during those halcyon \u201cStay the Blazes Home\u201d days, when people were reportedly moving here to escape the pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fact that neither the sensationalism of the 411 percent increase, nor the more balanced \u201cabove the national average\u201d have been reported suggest that the government\u2019s wise monkey approach has been aided by spread of \u201ccovid fatigue\u201d into the ranks of an already understaffed, beleaguered media. Indeed, the quintessentially beleaguered Chronicle-Herald <\/em>reported the opposite story, creating the headline \u201cStrang: Death toll below national average\u201d in its August 31 edition. This is accurate if you count from the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 but is not reflective of what\u2019s been happening since restrictions were eased. <\/p>\n\n\n\n