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.
It’s been five years since COVID-19 changed the world in St. Albert.
Alberta announced its first confirmed case on March 5, 2020. Months of states of emergencies, on-and-off restrictions, and thousands of deaths province-wide followed soon after, upending many aspects of everyday life.
Five years later, and much has returned to normal. There are no mask mandates or public gathering restrictions, and no regular announcements of COVID cases on the TV from health officials.
But much more has not. The pandemic has made lasting changes to life in St. Albert, ones the Gazette will examine in the coming weeks as part of this four-part series.
Shorter, sicker lives
COVID has changed many aspects of the health of Canadians. Take medical masks, for example. You’d get strange looks wearing one in public prior to 2019 unless you were a doctor in a hospital. Masks became mandatory and ubiquitous for much of the pandemic. You won’t find them everywhere nowadays, but it’s not hard to find a librarian, student, or shopper who’s still masked-up in public.
Front line care has changed as well, explained Dr. Allan McDonald of St. Albert’s Associate Medical Clinic. Pre-pandemic, doctors were not allowed to charge for phone appointments, meaning you had to trudge down to the doctor’s office for every bandage or prescription renewal. The province changed this policy early in the pandemic to limit the disease’s spread. Today, doctors routinely resolve simple matters over the phone, which is more convenient for patients.
Statistics Canada has noted other measurable changes to our health since the pandemic. We see ourselves as sicker and less healthy, for example, with about 52 per cent of us reporting our perceived health to be very good or excellent in 2023 — about seven per cent less than in 2021 and eight per cent less than in 2015–2020.
“There is a sense that people are sicker,” said Dr. Joe Vipond, an emergency physician in Calgary and co-chair of the Canadian Covid Society, adding that some researchers suspect COVID may cause lasting harm to the immune system.
COVID is now the sixth leading cause of death in Canada, Statistics Canada reports, with more than 6,300 Albertans dying from it since 2020. These deaths have helped carve some 0.5 years off the average life expectancy of Canadians compared to 2019.
COVID has also introduced a new threat to our health in the form of long COVID — a form of the disease where COVID symptoms persist at least three months. About 3.5 million Canadians, or about one in nine people, have had it as of 2024, noted Grace Lam, a professor of pulmonary medicine who studies long COVID at the University of Alberta.
“It is a challenging disease,” she said, one that can make people unable to work or care for their families. It also, to date, has no cure.
St. Albert resident Jennifer Kendall told the Gazette last August about her three-year struggle with long COVID, which had forced her to give up hiking, sell her house, and go on disability.
“It’s frustrating because people don’t understand what you’re going through,” she said.
“They think, ‘Oh, it’s just the flu, you’ll get over it,’ and you don’t.”
On the front lines
COVID has also affected those who practice medicine.
Orissa Shima, president of the United Nurses of Alberta Local 85 at the Sturgeon Community Hospital, said she still sees COVID at the hospital every day, with her and her co-workers in and out of masks and other protective gear all the time.
“Since COVID, nurses at the Sturgeon are overwhelmed on a daily basis,” she said in an email, with the number of patients and the severity of their illnesses both up considerably.
Shima said nurses now regularly use hallways, alcoves, and storage room for patient care due to space shortages. “Moral distress” was common as they have to constantly triage who gets care first.
Vipond said some of these stresses were due to high rates of COVID and flu infections in recent months. Others were the result of rapid population growth that has not been matched by growth in hospital capacity.
The stress of being a doctor during the pandemic may have pushed some into early retirement and contributed to Alberta’s ongoing doctor shortage, McDonald said.
“At our clinic, we’ve lost in the past six years I think six doctors to retirement, and we’ve not replaced them.”
The Canadian Medical Association doesn’t have data on doctors retiring due to pandemic-related burnout, said spokesperson Eric Lewis in an email. The 2025 edition of the National Physician Health Survey (launched March 14) will examine this topic. The 2021 edition of that survey found that about 53 per cent of physicians and medical learners were experiencing high levels of burnout, with 49 per cent thinking about reducing their clinical work hours in the next two years.
COVID exacerbated cracks that already existed in health care, Shima said. The province has to invest in primary care and expand the Sturgeon Hospital if it wants to fill these cracks.
“If we want things to improve, we need a government that focus on putting patients first, not profit. We need a government that focuses on building public health care, not dismantling it.”
