Omicron impact on Manitoba health-care system a big danger: infectious disease specialist

An infectious disease specialist says the strain on Manitoba’s health-care system caused by the COVID-19 Omicron variant is reaching a breaking point.

While health officials say Omicron tends to have less severe outcomes than previous variants of COVID-19, Manitoba continues to see spikes in hospitalizations, and ICUs continue to operate above capacity.

The number of Manitobans in hospital due to COVID-19 increased by 19 Tuesday, totalling 620 hospitalizations in the province.

The number of ICU patients with COVID also rose by one to 48. Three more people died due to the virus Tuesday after 20 new deaths were reported over the weekend.

Dr. Kevin Coombs, a professor of medical microbiology and infectious diseases at the University of Manitoba, says the province’s health-care system is in trouble.

“Hospitalizations always lag behind case counts by about a week, so even if the actual numbers of case counts were going down, our hospitalizations are almost certainly going to continue to rise for the next week or so,” said Coombs.

“It’s the impact on the health-care system, which is already stretched thin, that is the biggest danger to this province.”

Last week, Manitoba reported a 40 per cent increase in hospitalizations and an 85 per cent increase in ICU numbers over the previous week.

Coombs says it is difficult to predict how much worse this could get, but points out that Manitoba is getting dangerously close to having to ship patients out of province again.

“At that time, other provinces could handle our excess, but it’s not clear that they could do so now,” he said.

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Last week, Premier Heather Stefanson and Dr. Jazz Atwal were criticized for saying that it’s up to Manitobans to look after themselves as Omicron continues to spread rapidly in the province. When asked Tuesday about the rise in hospitalizations, Stefanson says the rise is “due to Omicron.”

“We will get through this, we will work with Shared Health, public health and we will work with Manitobans to ensure we will get to the other side of this,” said Stefanson.

Many doctors and health-care workers in Manitoba called for a circuit breaker shut down and stricter restrictions in the fourth wave, but nothing was implemented further by the province. As for possible stricter restrictions, Stefanson says public health is continuing to assess the situation.

“We get continuously updated on various modelling and what we have seen on modelling so far is that it is not accurate, and I know Dr. Atwal mentioned last week that they had to send the modelling back a few times because it was so far from what reality was. So we will continue to look at the evidence and monitor that,” said the premier.

But Coombs says the current status of hospitals is all due to the government’s lack of response to warning signs.

“I don’t want to sound like the ‘sky is falling,’ but we are in a precarious situation which is an awful lot like that movie, ‘Don’t Look Up,’ where people in power weren’t paying attention and disaster occurred. I hope that doesn’t happen, but the ingredients are there.”