A think tank that has been collecting data on COVID-19 in Canadian long-term care homes says it must stop its work because provinces are no longer making enough public information about the spread of the virus in the sector.
The National Institute on Aging project, based at Metropolitan University of Toronto, was launched in April 2020 and presents information on cases, outbreaks and deaths in long-term care facilities in map form, with a summary for each province and territory. .
He has provided data to organizations such as the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canadian Institute for Health Information and has contributed to national and international research on COVID-19 in a sector that has seen a large share of Canada’s deaths because of the virus.
But provinces have been sharing less data on outbreaks and cases since the beginning of this year, and the information is made available to the public far less frequently than in the past. The situation has reached a point where it is now too difficult to keep the think tank’s project alive, said Dr. Samir Sinha, director of health policy research at the institute.
“It’s not that we don’t want to continue to do that, and that we wouldn’t be interested in offering to do that,” Sinha said in an interview.
“It is impossible to continue doing this task in an accurate and reliable way.”
The Long-Term Care COVID-19 Monitoring Project website will be available online with the data collected starting July 1, but work is stopping to update it.
Sector still under pandemic pressure
The long-term care sector is still reeling from the effects of COVID-19.
New outbreaks have risen rapidly in Ontario as the province grapples with a seventh wave of infections, more than doubling from week to week in early July.
Without sufficient data, however, it is difficult to understand what is happening with COVID-19 in long-term care and how to best respond or plan for future outbreaks, Sinha said.
The National Institute on Aging wants provinces and territories to reach a common agreement on a consistent way to collect and publicly report data on long-term care and COVID-19, he said.
The think tank would also like to see provinces, territories and the federal government choose an independent body to report the data.
Sinha suggested giving the Canadian Institute for Health Information a mandate to collect information on COVID-19 in long-term care, which he said he was surprised to learn wasn’t already underway when CIHI representatives they contacted him before the pandemic. with interest in your team’s data collection work.
Approaching political considerations: researcher
The lack of access to public data on outbreaks, cases and deaths makes it harder to assess what’s happening in the sector and makes governments less accountable to public pressure, Sinha argued.
“I think it’s become more politically expedient not to actually report the information, rather than continue to remind people that we still have systemic and ongoing problems protecting our long-term care facilities and their residents,” he said. .
Governments may be tracking the data somewhere, but it’s unclear whether the information is being looked at to inform policy responses, Sinha said, adding that it’s difficult to collect information retroactively if it’s not maintained. records at this time.
“The problem is, you can’t go back,” Sinha said.