COVID @ 5
The COVID-19 pandemic changed much about life in St. Albert. This four-part series will examine the effects of those changes five years later.
Five years after the start of the pandemic, and Alberta is once again grappling with not one, but two major outbreaks of respiratory disease.
Four cases of measles have been reported in the Edmonton zone as of April 14, with 74 known provincewide and scores more in the U.S. This comes on the heels of Canada hitting its highest levels of influenza since 2020 back in February.
Hundreds of studies from the pandemic have shown us that masks and vaccines could help stop the spread of both these diseases. Yet we now have a provincial task force saying that masking doesn’t work and shouldn’t be mandated to stop respiratory disease, and UCP MLAs sponsoring talks questioning the safety of vaccines.
This begs the question: did we learn anything from COVID?
Positive prep
It’s very likely that Alberta will see another pandemic, said St. Albert Mayor Cathy Heron. When it does, this time the city won’t have to set up an emergency response centre from scratch: instead, they can just walk into the one set up at Fire Hall #1 and get to work.
“St. Albert is much more prepared than we were in 2020,” she said, and has in the last five years developed detailed response plans for fires, train derailments, pandemics, and other crises.
“From a city reaction perspective, we’re ready.”
Medical science has also improved. COVID research has taught us much about airborne disease transmission and allowed us to create new vaccines in record time, noted Joe Vipond, co-chair of the Canadian COVID Society. Governments have also invested hundreds of millions of dollars into places like the University of Alberta to find new ways to spot and stop pandemic-level threats.
The pandemic also re-emphasized the importance of vaccines, which have saved tens of millions of lives worldwide in the last 50 years and proven to be very safe, said Lynora Saxinger, an infectious disease specialist at the U of A. The C.D. Howe Institute found that the COVID-19 vaccine prevented some 34,900 deaths in Canada from 2021-22, saving us some $27.6 billion.
The pandemic proved that masks work against airborne disease. A May 2024 analysis of some 400 studies (which Vipond co-authored) found masks, if consistently and correctly worn, reduce respiratory disease transmission, and mask mandates reduce community transmission. A University of Maryland study also released that month found masks, regardless of their type, stopped 70 to 98 per cent of the viral particles breathed out by people infected with COVID.
And it showed the importance of proper ventilation. James Talbot, former chief medical officer of health for Alberta, said Alberta’s schools should beef up their ventilation systems to guard against both respiratory disease and wildfire smoke.
“That would pay off every year,” he said, as students would miss less school because of flu and forest fires.
Sturgeon Public Schools experimented with HEPA filters and UV sterilizers during the pandemic but removed them in 2022 because of cost, said spokesperson Lauren Walter. Greater St. Albert Catholic has continued to use higher-grade MERV 8 filters and electrostatic disinfectant sprayers in its schools, spokesperson Shanlyn Cunningham reported.
Lessons lost
Working against these advances are misinformation and provincial leadership, experts say.
Talbot said Alberta’s initial success with COVID was due to a robust health care system that identified it as a threat early, responded quickly, and developed and distributed vaccines rapidly. It’s an open question as to whether the province still has such capabilities now the province has broken up Alberta Health Services. COVID should have shown leaders the importance of rapid, early intervention when it comes to keeping outbreaks from getting out of hand, yet the province has seemed content to slow-roll its response to the current measles outbreak.
“If COVID taught us anything, it should have taught us that that is a mistake,” Talbot said.
The province has taken legal steps that could hinder future pandemic responses, explained Lorian Hardcastle, an associate professor of health law and policy at the University of Calgary.
The province changed Alberta’s Bill of Rights last fall to forbid forced vaccinations or medical procedures because of complaints people had about COVID prevention measures, for example. Hardcastle said this could open disease control measures such as vaccine passports up to court challenges. In 2022, the province banned municipalities from implementing mask mandates or vaccine passports without provincial approval, taking away tools communities could have used to battle future regional outbreaks. The province has also broken up Alberta Health Services without specifying which part of it will be responsible for public health.
“There’s always another public health emergency around the corner,” she said, and we need clarity on who will be responsible for the response.
Talbot criticized the province’s 2023 decision to give cabinet, not the chief medical officer of health, final say over any future pandemic responses.
“These are life-and-death decisions,” he said, and he argued they should be left up to trained medical professionals, not politicians.
The province has also endorsed ideas that undermine trust in masks and vaccines.
UCP MLAs have sponsored town hall meetings that question the safety of COVID vaccines, for example — vaccines that have been administered more than 105 million times in Canada as of 2023 without serious adverse reactions 99.989 per cent of the time, Health Canada reports. The province also commissioned the 2025 Pandemic Data Review Task Force, the final report of which said the province should not use mask mandates against respiratory diseases, allow doctors to prescribe alternative COVID treatments such as Ivermectin (which does not work against COVID), and halt the use of COVID vaccines in youth because of the risk of myocarditis (despite the fact that COVID poses a much higher risk for myocarditis than said vaccines).
Saxinger was one of the many experts to sign an open letter to the province calling for the task force’s report to be officially dismissed for use because of its scientific inaccuracy, with Saxinger telling the CBC that the report was “a public health threat.”
Timothy Caulfield, a U of A law professor who studies misinformation and also signed that open letter, said the report was an example of how provincial leaders have embraced anti-science ideas and discarded lessons from the pandemic.
“It does feel at times we’re slipping into a dark age.”
Normalize the norms
Caulfield said Albertans can help prepare for the next pandemic by working to stop the spread of misinformation. Fact-check what you see online, don’t spread conspiracy theories, and guide those taken in by them to accurate information.
U of A sociologist Amy Kaler said Albertans should normalize disease-controlling practices such as masks, vaccines, and staying home when you’re sick, by promoting and practising them.
“The more normal and part of the background masking becomes, the easier it will be to adopt [it] again.”
Talbot called on leaders to become more science literate and to speak out against misinformation when they hear it.
“You don’t really want policy in the province to be driven by who has the most clicks [online] or who has the loudest voice,” he said.
“You want to use the best evidence possible.”
