The Ontario government is downgrading COVID-19 from a novel coronavirus to a “disease of public health significance,” which will limit the amount of data medical officers of health can report.
The change is being proposed through a regulation, which was open for public comment for a week earlier this month.
Under the new designation, medical officers of health will not be required to report COVID-19 data unrelated to deaths and outbreaks to the Ministry of Health or Public Health Ontario.
Individuals who perform point-of-care testing will no longer be required to report every positive result to the Medical Officer of Health.
The ministry said the change aligns data collection for COVID-19 with the other 24 diseases tracked by public health units. Data will still be sent directly from laboratories to Public Health Ontario (PHO), which has been expanded to include public health unit and age breakdowns “to account for a larger proportion of tests,” according to PHO.
“When COVID-19 first emerged, detailed information was needed as the disease was new and little was known about its potential impact on public health,” the Health Minister said. Sylvia Jones' Spokesman Hannah Jensen told Queen's Park today,
“COVID-19 surveillance will continue using existing administrative data streams (e.g., percent positivity, hospital-reported daily bed census, ICU data, COVID-19 outbreak data),” Jensen said in a statement.
According to a disclaimer on the PHO website, this means public reporting of case numbers and rates “will be paused,” though other “long-term integrated data solutions” for COVID-19 will be explored.
Public health experts say this regulation will reduce the administrative burden on staff. For example, Toronto Public Health said it will create “operational efficiencies” that will allow staff to focus their resources on outbreak management.
However, Dr. Andrew PintoAssociate Professor at the University of Toronto and Director of the Upstream Lab – a non-profit research lab focused on the social determinants of health – told Queen's Park today She is concerned about the changes that come with COVID-19 funding cuts for the wastewater monitoring program.
“It's a balance of, while we're running out of data in one area, do we have data in another source? And I would say that wastewater monitoring was fairly inexpensive for the amount of information we got and it also gave us a system that could be scaled up quickly in a new pandemic,” he said.
Pinto agreed that COVID-19 is no longer “new,” but it will never be eradicated.
“My biggest concern is about the future,” he said, noting that other disease types are also increasing rapidly that may require more intensive data collection.
NDP Health Critic France Gélinas has similar concerns, and said variants of COVID-19 are still making people “very sick.”
“They’re telling us it’s not important anymore,” Gelinas said. “It goes against the very nature of public health to bury your head in the sand by not collecting the information that should be collected.”