Tuesday marks the five-year anniversary of news that changed virtually everything about the way British Columbians lived, some things permanently.
Jan. 28, 2020, was the date that provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry and then-health minister Adrian Dix announced the first case of COVID-19 in the province.
Just over a month later, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic.
“I want to really go back and applaud British Columbians because we protected each other, it was really, really important at first,” said Dr. Sarah Otto, a mathematical zoologist at UBC who became one of the province’s most prominent scientists modelling the COVID-19’s evolution.
“The virus was much more virulent, it was much more likely to cause hospitalizations and death, at first when nobody had immunity and it was the original strain. And people protected each other.”
The arrival of the first vaccines in December 2020, nearly a year after the first case was confirmed, was a game-changer and precipitated the largest mass vaccination campaign in the province’s history.
But it would be several years and variant-driven waves of COVID-19 before life returned to some semblance of normalcy for most British Columbians, and the province didn’t formally lift its declaration of a public health emergency until last July.
According to the B.C. Centre for Disease Control’s official COVID-19 dashboard, which was retired in April 2023, B.C. officially recorded nearly 400,000 cases of the virus, along with more than 5,400 deaths, while nearly 35,000 people were hospitalized. Those numbers almost certainly underestimate the impact, and do not account for the ongoing impact the virus continues to have.
In the early stages of the pandemic, strict public health measures saw bans on public gatherings and restrictions on travel and businesses, policies that hit the tourism and hospitality sectors particularly hard.
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Dustin Dockendorf, co-owner of Autostrada Osteria, was in the middle of opening the restaurant’s current location when the pandemic hit and said that while the business survived, it’s still fighting to get out of “the COVID shadow.”
“We opened right in the middle of COVID with plastic barriers, limited seating, costs going up … we didn’t have the volume and we didn’t have a financial model to really chip away at the debt,” he said.
“We had to take on more debt to of course make it through that period.”
The lifting of public health measures allowed bars and restaurants to get back to business, but Dockendorf said there is no question the industry has since changed.
The post-pandemic surge in inflation has left businesses dealing with higher costs, while customers are far more cost-sensitive, he said.
“There is still some sticker shock to the cost of dining out now,” he said. “Some are dining out a little differently, drinking a little less, dining during happy hour.”
Despite the damage, Dockendorf said there were some positive lasting changes implemented during the pandemic, including the widespread approval of streetside patios and a liquor policy update that allowed businesses to buy products at wholesale prices.
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The social implications of the pandemic continue to play out, from lasting divisions over vaccine mandates to the political fallout from inflation and the rising cost of living associated with the COVID era.
The strain of the pandemic also revealed significant cracks in the province’s healthcare system.
“In the aftermath of it, we’ve been playing catch up with we know we’ve been playing catch up with the surgeries. We’ve been playing catch up with cancer screenings, with routine vaccinations for children,” Vancouver family physician Anna Wolak told CKNW radio.
“Now we’re looking down the road of there are other things that Covid has has uncovered, not the least of which is just how much our health care system is falling apart and how we’re not able to handle it.”
Wolak added that the “spectre of long COVID” also remains, with many unanswered questions about how the condition will affect people’s healthcare in the years to come.
There also remains uncertainty about the potential long-term impacts of COVID on the health of people who have recovered from the virus.
“Such as an increase in autoimmune diseases in the younger population — we don’t know if it’s related, it could be related,” she said.
“We’re seeing an increase in diabetes. There is an increase, a very scary increase, of cancer in the younger population, which is theorized to be related to it. So it’s hard to say for sure.”
But Otto said she’s also closely watching the implications it will have on the future of public health as well.
COVID-19 itself continues to circulate, though hospitalizations and deaths have fallen greatly due to increased immunity, but Otto said there is always the chance a new variant could emerge that either spreads more quickly or is more damaging.
“Severe cases are down, but COVID is not down,” she said. “We continue to see variant after variant evolving. Right in Canada at the moment, there’s almost 250 different variants circulating.”
Alternately, another virus like H5N1 influenza could mutate to become more virulent and set off another pandemic of its own, she said.
After COVID-19, are we better prepared?
“I have some fears just personally that we are sick of doing any pandemic measures, and so we are at a less prepared state to actually do the things we need to do to protect each other,” Otto said.
“But on the other hand, I do believe we care about our communities and if we know an infection is running rampant and our friends and families are at risk, we will take the measures w need to.”