A report by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), published in the PHAC's peer-reviewed journal, claims that public health measures prevented "almost a million deaths" in Canada during the Covid pandemic, with lockdowns and mask mandates saving 325,000 lives and vaccines 360,000.
Report co-authored by Theresa Tam claims Canada's COVID measures avoided 800,000 deaths | National Post - Ryan Tumilty:
October 3, 2022 - "A new paper from scientists at the Public Health Agency of Canada [PHAC], 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 [mandates], were simply lifted earlier.
"According to the paper, which had several authors including Tam, the worst-case 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....
"In all of the scenarios it looked at, hospitals were overwhelmed with far more patients than they could accommodate with beds....
"'The simulations show that the combination of public health measures and vaccinations that occurred in Canada resulted in far fewer infections, hospitalizations and deaths,' the researchers wrote. 'The earlier measures were lifted, the worse were the outcomes in terms of hospitalizations and deaths.'
"The paper also looked at what would have happened if Canada had used public health measures, but not vaccines and found that would have resulted in roughly 360,000 deaths and close to a million hospitalizations. The estimates show that abandoning all public health measures and relying solely on vaccines would have produced roughly 325,000 deaths and 850,000 hospitalizations. It also looked at other scenarios where public health measures were lifted earlier than they were starting in July 2020 after the first wave was over; that estimate suggested there would be 220,000 deaths and approximately 550,000 people in hospital....
"Isaac Bogoch,* an infectious disease physician and researcher, said there is definitely evidence the pandemic could have been far worse, and the early days of the virus where it was poorly understood and ran rampant are a good indicator.... However, he cautioned PHAC’s numbers, while reasonable, are just estimates.... 'We just have to obviously interpret the results with caution and in context.'"
* signatory of the John Snow memorandum
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