Chiefs in dark about key virus information

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This article was published 02/11/2020 (1417 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba public health officials have told northern chiefs not to cause panic over COVID-19, despite not telling them whether the virus has entered their communities via workers at the Keeyask mega project near Gillam.

Meanwhile, the province escalated the outbreak at the Manitoba Hydro site to code red on Tuesday.

“As community leaders, it’s important that we make certain that accurate information is being delivered to the residents to ease panic when (an outbreak) happens close to home,” reads a template the Northern Regional Health Authority has used in multiple emails to chiefs and mayors, which was obtained by the Free Press.

Bands and towns across the north have received such “heads-up” emails multiple times since Oct. 25, notifying them of cases in their health district, an area that includes a small cluster of communities, and that contact tracing is underway.

Yet the chiefs and mayors are told to not make any of the details public until the online dashboard shows cases — which sometimes never happens, because of the way Manitoba sorts data.

“Please do not distribute this information publicly prior to the daily provincial updates,” the email template says.

The upshot is that chiefs have no clue if someone who has the virus is on their reserve, and can’t inform residents.

Manitoba sorts its cases by residency, so anyone with COVID-19 who normally lives in Winnipeg gets categorized as a city case. That includes if they’re a band member who has gone to visit family on the reserve, or fallen ill there.

“Patients generally isolate and recover from their home location,” a Health Department spokeswoman wrote.

The Thompson-Mystery Lake district had 31 active cases as of Tuesday, and Thompson has been notified about Keeyask-related cases in its district. But it’s unclear whether those cases live in the city, the nearby Nelson House reserve or elsewhere.

In another example, the Keeyask site is in the Gillam-Fox Lake health district, which lists no active cases since this summer, on its online dashboard

That’s despite Hydro saying Monday there have been 16 confirmed cases at the Keeyask camp. Only seven have left the area. That means at least nine active cases are at the site, but none is listed online.

And yet, the provincial emails to chiefs and mayors insist “the provincial website is the true source of information for COVID-19 in Manitoba.”

Last month, the province admitted its website lists an inaccurately high number of active cases.

On Tuesday, Hydro raised the number of confirmed cases at Keeyask to 20, while the province quietly moved the site to code red.

“Public health is notified when a test is done in one location and isolation and/or treatment will take place in another location.”

During Tuesday’s question period, Crown Services Minister Jeff Wharton revealed that Keeyask had been changed to code red.

That change had not been included in the lengthy daily bulletin the province released just two hours earlier, despite mounting calls from Indigenous leadership to give the site that designation.

— With files from Danielle Da Silva

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca