Infectious disease specialist questions changes to COVID-19 data reporting in KFL&A

While the Kingston area continues to see some of the highest COVID-19 infection rates in the province, public health said this week it would no longer be reporting the number of cases linked to outbreaks.

But Kingston is not unique. According to a research specialist, there is a lack of transparency at the provincial level that has experts shaking their heads.

Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington Public Health took to Twitter Monday afternoon to announce it was changing the COVID-19 information on its dashboard.

It will no longer be reporting the number of cases linked to an outbreak and it is scrapping the colour-coded risk listing. This is after data tracked by Ontario’s COVID-19 science table came out.

Last week it reported that the KFL&A region has the highest COVID-19 infection rate in the province.

Public health told Global News it made the change over concerns that the less accurate rapid antigen tests have been used to confirm cases and declare outbreaks.

“This makes the number of confirmed cases associated with an outbreak misleading,” public health said in a statement. “We have removed the risk listing from the dashboard because of continued changes to testing, making it impossible to determine standard definitions for risk level.”

But changes like this to the level of reporting have experts like Dr. Tara Moriarty, associate professor and infectious disease researcher at the University of Toronto, scratching their heads.

She says removing that information is not useful for the general public, who are, at this stage of the pandemic, expected to take control of their own risk assessment.

“I actually, truly do not understand. I think that this is something that decision-makers, they have never, since the beginning of Omicron, communicated their reasoning about the decisions that are made, both with respect to drastically restricting testing.”

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The province does not have public COVID-19 reporting mandates in place, leaving it up to individual health units.

This province-led approach, Moriarty says, has resulted in Canada as a whole reporting far less than high-income OECD peer countries.

“It leads to an enormous undermining of trust in institutions which every person working in public health should know is absolutely crucial,” Moriarty said.

Moriarty and other scientists have voluntarily collected data and launched the COVID-19 Resources Canada platform. They are currently working on creating their own risk assessment tool for Canadians, hoping to fill in the picture.