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The B.C. Liberal party’s health and education critics have asked the provincial government to start providing more detailed COVID-19 information — particularly around schools, vaccines and testing.
Opposition health critic Renee Merrifield and opposition education critic Jackie Tegart sent a letter on Monday to Health Minister Adrian Dix calling for a daily vaccine report (including in which health regions they were delivered) a breakdown on the number of private and public tests conducted each day and more detailed reporting on school outbreaks.
“We are writing to express our deep concern about the lack of transparency concerning public reporting of COVID-19 data by your government,” the pair wrote.
“In recent months there has been a steady call for more detailed COVID-19 data from educators and parents of school-aged children, community leaders, seniors care advocates, family members of seniors in long-term care, local governments and members of the media.”
They said B.C. lagged behind Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan in its COVID data reporting.
An example is the Ministry of Health’s reporting of COVID-19 outbreaks in long-term care facilities. Until last fall, the ministry provided a five-day-a-week report detailing all active outbreaks, how many cases there were among staff and residents and how many deaths.
The change in policy was highlighted two weeks ago when reporters were unable to get confirmation from Vancouver Coastal Health of how many seniors had died in what is now the worst outbreak B.C. has seen — at Little Mountain Place in East Vancouver.
“As a result of gaps in B.C.’s data reporting, it has been left up to independent researchers, scientists, parents and journalists to compensate for the lack of information being disclosed by your government,” Merrifield and Tegart wrote.
An example of parents stepping up is the B.C. School COVID Tracker on Facebook that has been keeping a running tally on the number of outbreaks, clusters and exposures in B.C. schools. They do this because the provincial government does not publish a tally of past and present exposures — instead relying on piecemeal reporting by the various health authorities.
B.C. scientist Jens von Bergmann has also tried to gather, interpret and explain local COVID-19 data through his Twitter feed @vb_jens.
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