Quebec public health chief defends ending school masks, referencing new antibody study

Quebec authorities estimated a few weeks ago that a full quarter of the population caught Omicron over the course of December and January, or about two million people.

That wasn't quite right, Public Health Director Dr. Luc Boileau said Wednesday. Actually, further study has suggested the number is more like three million.

And many of the uncounted cases were among children, he said, with a new study showing that a vast number of them were exposed to the virus during the fifth wave.

That's a key fact for the upcoming season, Boileau said. Going into a period of reopening, and especially with schools' March Break coming up, he said the risks the province is taking are "calculated."

Further exposure for children can be seen in light of how much the virus has already circulated, he said.

The news this week that the province plans to lift the school mask mandate as of March 7 was met with anger, partly from teachers, who said they felt it was a slap in the face.

• READ MORE: Quebec to lift mask mandate in classrooms as of March 7; teachers say they feel disrespected

Boileau said the province considers it a priority to abandon children's mask use at school for kids' social and educational needs, letting them interact more freely, and especially to give a hand to "vulnerable" children who have more difficulty learning or socializing.

"We do know that there are benefits [to not wearing] masks... for socialization, for learning aptitudes, and namely for kids that will have a problem with speech, language or other things related to... their capacity for learning," he said.

The province is also trying to make it a "controlled risk" by still requiring students to wear masks while circulating outside of their classrooms.

After the press conference, the province released the basis for some of Boileau's estimates -- study done about a month ago by researchers based at Ste-Justine Children's Hospital in Montreal, testing the blood of hundreds of children and teens for COVID-19 antibodies. It was released Wednesday.

The results suggested, Boileau said, that the majority of children have been exposed to at least one variant of COVID-19, with roughly a third exposed to Omicron.

However, one prominent Montrealer skeptical of the mask plan said the study seemed to have some holes.

The study was of children "in Montreal only, who visited the emergency room," said Olivier Drouin, who runs the citizen data website Covid Ecoles Quebec.

The results "make Dr. Boileau conclude that one child out of three has recently been in contact with COVID-19... out of 1,601,864 children under 17 years old in the province," Drouin said.

"I am not an expert, but seems that it is a large extrapolation and should be taken into context," he said, also pointing out that vaccine coverage among children under 12 is the lowest, by far, of any age group.

Only about 63 per cent of kids ages five to 11 have a first dose, and only 40 per cent have both doses.

Among teens, only three per cent have gotten their boosters, with most having gotten their second doses more than six months ago.

Kids still have the risk of developing long COVID, even if they don't often end up in hospital when initially infected, said Drouin.

NO PLANS YET TO ABANDON MASKS FOR ADULTS

Marie-France Raynault, a senior health advisor, said the province is thinking not only of children with learning difficulties or other serious problems, but also children who are just "shy, who have more trouble talking to others" while wearing a mask.

"I think the risk is low for children -- they're not very sick when they they get COVID, but the [social and educational] risk is high for vulnerable children, and they have suffered lots since the beginning of the pandemic and we have to take care of them also," she said.

Getting rid of masks in wider society won't happen immediately, either way, health authorities said. Boileau said masks are still "very useful" in containing the spread of the virus.

"We don't have a schedule for stopping at the moment, because we want to have a chance to see the impact of our easing of measures," said Raynault.

The epidemiological situation can change very fast, she said, and it's important to build in cushions like this.

"If everything goes well," the province will be picking a firm date to ditch masks for adults, she said. When asked if it was fair to say that would happen by the end of April, or at least this spring, she said again it's too early to set a time.

Montreal authorities on Wednesday put their own estimate at just over one million infected by Omicron in the city region, or about a third of the Montreal population, but Boileau said he suspected that will also turn out to be an undercount.