THUNDER BAY — Public health officials say there’s been a lot to learn during the half-decade since the COVID-19 pandemic first took hold in Northwestern Ontario and beyond.
“COVID is still an issue — not like it was five years ago — and we do have some tools to guard against it,” said Janet DeMille, the medical officer of health and chief executive officer of the Thunder Bay District Health Unit.
“But it is still out there and, unfortunately, it's something we're likely not going to get rid of.”
While many lessons have been heeded, she said that she feels more should have been done in the intervening years around things like indoor air quality.
“I think one of the lessons that I'm not sure has really been implemented is around the importance of clean indoor air and proper ventilation and filters and things like that,” she said. “I feel like that would help us in … another pandemic.”
“I’m not sure that's a lesson that's been really implemented at this time.”
DeMille said that the pandemic put a lot of strain on front-line health care and public health, and that emergency preparedness needs to be an ongoing priority.
“I think, one of the areas that (is) probably the biggest concern — with respect to another pandemic, for example — is healthcare capacity and public health capacity,” she said. “Because a pandemic really impacts health care, acute care, primary care, and certainly there's ongoing struggles with that at normal times, right?”
She added that more should also be done around investment in, and support for, health and public health, including around identifying and reviewing threats, particularly infectious diseases. She said more could also have been done to review the COVID-19 pandemic itself.
As for what DeMille said she feels the pandemic did successfully teach was the importance of personal protective equipment and boosting the capacity for laboratories to better handle larger volumes of testing. She also said a lot was learned about mass immunization clinics and their effectiveness.
“Whether it's flu — when you prepare for a pandemic, you're often thinking about a flu pandemic — so this one was a bit of a different virus, but the importance of being able to get vaccine out fairly quickly,” she said.
“We were very successful, I think, in the work that we did here, but also with partners so that we have a lot of that documented, so we could ramp up something like that much easier next time.”
Work around proactive infection prevention and control is something else DeMille said she feels has improved from a public health standpoint, particularly in settings with larger numbers of people in the same place, like long-term care homes.
She said that the virus’s prolonged effects in certain people, which have also been called “long-COVID,” are still occurring.
While many day-to-day effects of the pandemic have largely passed, DeMille said it’s still important to remember that the virus hasn’t gone away and likely never will, and, unlike influenza, which tends to have seasonal spikes, COVID is more steadily present year-round.
“COVID is still there … there's a certain unpredictability of it, but the variants that we see for the most part are causing milder illness,” DeMille said, adding that it still can be very serious.
“There are still people hospitalized pretty much all the time due to COVID, so it's still having an impact … on people who have it,” she said.
