Confusion takes root as COVID restrictions take time By: Carol Sanders Posted: 7:30 PM CDT Friday, Aug. 21, 2020

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This article was published 20/08/2020 (1542 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Giving southwest Manitoba residents several days (including a weekend) before elevated COVID-19 restrictions are enforced is not only asking for trouble, it casts doubt on whether it’s a true emergency, one outspoken health policy expert says.

“It’s like calling the fire department, and they say they’ll get to your house five days later,” Amir Attaran, professor of public health at the University of Ottawa, said Friday.

On Thursday, chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin raised Manitoba’s new pandemic response system risk level for the city of Brandon and the Prairie Mountain Health region to “orange” — one level below worst-case, critical red.

Everyone in the region must wear face masks in public places, and indoor and outdoor public gatherings are limited 10 people, with restrictions “effective immediately” but not fully “implemented” until Monday, he said.

“It will take time to facilitate these measures,” Roussin told a media briefing.

On Friday, Manitoba Health Minister Cameron Friesen repeated the mixed message in a news release.

“It’s like calling the fire department, and they say they’ll get to your house five days later.”
– Amir Attaran, professor of public health at the University of Ottawa

In one sentence, he said the restrictions “take effect immediately;” in the next, he said: “As of Monday, Aug. 24, masks will be mandatory in all public indoor places and at all indoor and outdoor public gatherings in the region, which will be restricted to 10 people.”

Issuing an urgent health threat, then giving people time to prepare for it can have disastrous consequences in a pandemic, Attaran said.

“This is a public health emergency,” Attaran said of the novel coronavirus pandemic situation in Prairie Mountain Health region. “Once you decide a limit on gatherings is necessary, waiting five days to implement it is foolhardy.”

There’s a chance people will attend gatherings this weekend in Prairie Mountain because it will be a taboo starting Monday — but they’re not the ones who follow public health advice anyway, virologist Jason Kindrachuk countered.

Getting the message out early to those in the region that they shouldn’t be partying and need to wear face masks, and why, will work with most people who don’t need the threat of enforcement, the assistant professor with the department of medical microbiology and infectious diseases at the University of Manitoba said.

“If you build up trust with the community, you get better adherence to policies that are enacted — you have that transparency,” Kindrachuk said.

“This is a public health emergency. Once you decide a limit on gatherings is necessary, waiting five days to implement it is foolhardy.”
– Amir Attaran on the novel coronavirus pandemic situation in Prairie Mountain Health region

However, if people don’t take the orange restrictions seriously, it won’t take much for a weekend gathering to cause COVID-19 chaos when there is already community transmission of the virus, Attaran warned. The province should also be telling people when they can expect things to go from yellow to orange to red, he said.

“There are a certain numbers of triggers that are numerical and, when you get above a certain threshold, that would be an automatic signal to go to the next level of alert,” said the Ottawa-based professor.

Roussin has said he won’t provide those numbers, because there are so many variables that need to be considered along with them. A trigger number taken in isolation won’t determine a public health response, he said.

It is not a stance Attaran agrees with.

“We are now half-a-year into COVID-19, and Manitoba lacks a clear definition of a threshold for when things go from yellow to orange,” he said, adding when there’s not a lot of transparency, there’s not a lot of trust.

For example, the province won’t divulge the five-day test-positivity rate for Prairie Mountain alone. The five-day test-positivity rate for the entire province rose to two per cent Friday.

Meanwhile, Kindrachuk said he trusts public health officials know what they’re doing. “Let’s give them a little rope to figure this out, put our faith in them, and see how things progress.”

He said a pandemic response system is useful in a place such as Manitoba because of its size and population distribution, so it can target needed measures. The timing is where it gets tricky, the virologist said.

“With all of these types of early-warning or emergency systems, there’s always a debate over how useful they are if they don’t give a response or a signal at the moment they happen to immediately follow up,” Kindrachuk said.

“Ultimately, we’re going to find out how it works.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca

Carol Sanders
Legislature reporter

After 20 years of reporting on the growing diversity of people calling Manitoba home, Carol moved to the legislature bureau in early 2020.

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