ACS20220131 - Were recent cases of COVID-19 significantly underestimated?

Over the month of December, the highly infectious Omicron variant overwhelmed much of the testing capacity across the country making it difficult to get an accurate idea of just how many people got the contagion. McMaster Professor Dominik Mertz, an infectious diseases physician observed that “we aren't able to test the majority of people anymore who are symptomatic.” In effect the question about the numbers of Omicron cases in Canada is not whether there was an underestimate but rather by how much. To get a better approximation of that number Canadians were asked whether they got Covid 19 over the past 60 days (prior to the survey which was conducted January 7-9, 2022). It revealed that the number that believed that they were positive (but not confirmed with a test) was nearly the same as the number that said they were confirmed with a positive test thus implying that the numbers of reported cases over that sixty day period might be as much as double what was reported. That said about 80% who ended up getting a test did not have Covid. Nonetheless the country was left with a great deal more that may have contracted the virus than the testing revealed and likely more so than at any previous point in the evolution of the contagion. The survey reveals that some three quarters of the untested that believe they had Covid are of the opinion that in the case of Omicron its effects on one’s health are less severe than were previous strains of Covid, a view shared by two thirds of Canadians that tested positive.