Social media post highlights province’s poor pandemic planning By: Tom Brodbeck Posted: 7:00 PM CST Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2020

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/11/2020 (1465 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitobans might still be in the dark about the details of a deadly outbreak at a nursing home last week, had it not been for an anonymous post on social media last week.

The fact an individual, identified as a Winnipeg paramedic in the post, had to speak out on the social media site Reddit Saturday to prompt provincial government officials to respond to this crisis should be deeply disturbing to Manitobans.

Make no mistake, had this person not blown the whistle, there would have been no public response over the weekend to the incident at Maples Long Term Care Home, nor probably any of the followup we’re now seeing by health officials.

The chain of events that followed the Reddit post was astonishing: multiple press conferences, admissions of failure by government, political buck-passing and finally, minimal measures put in place at some nursing homes.

Within hours of the story breaking (it was picked up almost immediately by media outlets), the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority called a rare weekend press conference, confirming most of the social media report. Gina Trinidad, the WRHA’s chief health operations officer, made the startling admission that the WRHA did not adequately prepare for the second wave of the pandemic to protect residents in personal care homes.

Jason Chester, vice-president of long-term care operations for Revera (the company that owns and operates Maples), claimed the home was fully staffed that evening. The information he presented was later shown to be false. But even he admitted the baseline complement was insufficient to handle the COVID-19 outbreak.

“The level of acuity and the care requirements certainly could be more robust,” said Chester.

On Sunday, Health Minister Cameron Friesen and Lanette Siragusa, Shared Health’s chief nursing officer, claimed they did everything possible to plan for the pandemic’s second wave in nursing homes, despite evidence to the contrary. Friesen blamed a lack of information brought to his office for his government’s failure to act earlier. He called for a further investigation into the Maples debacle.

None of this would have occurred without the Reddit post.

Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service Chief John Lane confirmed Monday paramedics treated residents on site Friday after a flurry of 911 calls. But a shortage of ambulances in Winnipeg prevented a more rapid response (a chronic problem that’s been ignored by the Pallister government for several years). The first ambulance arrived within minutes of the initial 7:10 p.m. call and paramedics transported a critically ill resident to hospital. But it took nearly three hours after that for the WFPS to arrive for an on-site assessment.

Manitoba’s emergency pandemic plan does not include an expansion of Winnipeg’s ambulance fleet (which would require provincial approval), even though the WRHA has increased its reliance on paramedics to support personal care homes.

The onion continued to unravel Monday when Siragusa revealed plans were made months ago to beef up staffing levels at personal care homes in the event of an outbreak. But those plans were never implemented, including at Maples, even in the aftermath of multiple outbreaks at nursing homes.

The WRHA did not start providing additional staffing resources to nursing homes until this week.

In a separate press conference, the WRHA revealed Maples operators requested staff support from the health authority prior to Nov. 6, but none was given. Only now is the WRHA assembling a clinical team to monitor nursing homes around the city.

All this after a single post on social media.

A defensive Premier Brian Pallister continued to complain Tuesday that his government has been unfairly criticized for its handling of the pandemic, calling such assessments “wrong.”

But he couldn’t explain how the province failed so badly to protect seniors in care homes, even though it was expected Manitoba would be hit with a second wave of COVID-19.

Scrambling to make changes following an anonymous post on social media is not emergency planning. It’s an indictment of how poorly the Pallister government has prepared for one of the worst disasters in Manitoba history.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca

Tom Brodbeck
Columnist

Tom has been covering Manitoba politics since the early 1990s and joined the Winnipeg Free Press news team in 2019.

   Read full biography