Report co-authored by Tam claims Canada’s COVID measures avoided 800,000 deaths

OTTAWA — A new paper from scientists at the Public Health Agency of Canada, co-authored by Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, estimates that with absolutely no public health measures and no vaccines, 800,000 people would have died from COVID-19 in Canada.

The paper was published in the Canada Communicable Disease Report, a peer-reviewed medical journal published by PHAC. The article, which appeared in the July/ August edition, presents a series of several counterfactual scenarios, from an approach with no public health measures or vaccines to scenarios where public health measures, like lockdowns and masks, were simply lifted earlier.

According to the paper, which had several authors including Tam, the worstcase scenario would have seen 34 million Canadians get the virus had it been allowed to run free. Two million of those people would have ended up in hospital and 800,000 would have died.

The paper used information up to April of this year, by which point 150,000 people had been hospitalized and 38,783 had died, a number which rose over the summer and now sits at just over 45,000 deaths.

The modelling information is only estimates of what would have happened, but is based on what agency data about how easily the virus spreads, how fatal it can be and how many people have ended up in hospital.

“In the absence of public health measures and vaccinations, a very large initial wave far exceeded hospital capacity as did a subsequent large Delta-driven wave as immunity waned, and this resulted in a very high number of hospitalizations and deaths.”

In all of the scenarios it looked at, hospitals were overwhelmed with far more patients than they could accommodate with beds. The researchers argue that without the measures the government took, many more people would have died.