15 months, 3 waves: How COVID-19 coursed through the capital

CBC News has examined the first three waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ottawa with the help of a public health expert to find out what happened, how they differed, what's changedand what can we learn.

Wave 1

"That famous week in March."

Most of us might remember where we were when we heard Dr. Vera Etches from Ottawa Public Health tell us to only leave home for essential reasons.

That was on March 15, 2020. Public health officials knew there was community spread and even before the province was willing to admit it, Etches sounded the alarm. That's whenwe began to work and learn from home.

"Everyone was exposed," said Doug Manuel, a member of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table and a senior scientist at The Ottawa Hospital.

Fifteen months later, Manuel recalls quicklyputting together modelling for Ottawa's local COVID-19 situation, which he fought to make publicly accessible. Models helppublic health officials plan for the future spread of infectious diseases like the coronavirus.

That modelling now includes wastewater data that aided Ottawa's response to the pandemic during the second and third waves.

The first wave of COVID-19 peaked with 784 active confirmed cases on April 27, 2020. In the first sixweeks of the pandemic, Ottawa recored 95 deaths.

By late June, the death toll in Ottawa grew to 263.

Scroll over the bar chart to see the mortality rate in the first wave:

"We had relatively higher mortality in the first wave because everyone was caught off guard," said Manuel.

"I teach public health. We'd always talk about quarantine as a theoretical thing in this kind of scale. We didn't know masks worked. We were doing textbook things we didn't think we'd pull the trigger on.

"It was a remarkable, historic moment."

That high mortality rate pushed the city's older population "into hiding,"as Manuel describes it.

Wave 2

The second wave was really a series of multiple ebbs and flows over five months, including a lull in November bookended by spikes in the early fall and January 2021.

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Summer parties ignited the first spike, Manuel says, which peaked at 1,501 active cases on Oct. 3, 2020.

Ottawa residents were moving around more than they did in the spring and early summer of 2020, and that led to more community spread, he added.

The reopening of schools did bring people out of their homes, but the amount of in-school transmission was low, and most of the spread was traced back to staff members, according to Manuel.

"It's a defining feature [of our fight against COVID-19] how well schools have done," he said, adding there have been few large school outbreaks in Ottawa.

Schools remained open through the end of 2020, which remained stable. Then came the holiday break, which included shopping and indoor gatherings.

The next spike was upon us.

"I was surprised at what people were doing," said Manuel, a self-described optimist.

"I was going to do a curbside pickup in the days before Christmas and I was the only one doing curbside. I thought, this wasn't going to go well."

On Dec. 20, there were 536 active cases in Ottawa. The post-holiday wave hit its high mark about three weeks later with 1,744 active cases.

A lockdown on Boxing Day helped stem the tide even though local officials thought Ottawa didn't need one at the time.

In the end, schools closed through the month of January while the city managed to bring the number of active cases back under 600 by early February.

Wave 3

There has been one defining trait of the COVID-19 pandemic: each wave has been worse than its predecessor.

Ottawa reached a COVID-19 pandemic record on April 17, 2021 almost exactly one year after the first wave peaked with 3,789 active cases.

The alpha variant helped accelerate the spread of the coronavirus,leading to another school closure after the delayed April Break, which ended up marking the last time most students would be in the classroomthis school year.

We saw it coming. It was preventable.- Doug Manuel, The Ottawa Hospital

Most of Ottawa's pandemic records were broken in April as the province began opening up while cases were rising, according to Manuel.

"We saw it coming. It was preventable," he said.

Manuel said people were growing tired of public health restrictions by late winter 2021, but the cityand provincereopened too soon.

"There was little public support for that kind of approach," he said.

Manuel said the reopening allowed the alpha variant to spread in March and April before the vaccine could make an impact.

The path forward

The third wave inevitably slowed and numbers improved due to a lockdown coupled with the vaccine rollout, which has allowed us to slowly reopen.

The city hopes summer 2021 will be closer to normal, but experts say the delta variant, first discovered in India, is more transmissible, and will make a larger impact in Ottawa starting in July.

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Two doses provides much better protection against delta, which is why the province pushed to make every adult eligible for a second dose as of Monday morning.

As of Friday, 26 per cent of Ottawa adults were fully vaccinated, and that will continue to rise at a steady pace this week.