Great expectations, uncertain reality amidst COVID clampdown By: Kevin Rollason and Larry Kusch Posted: 7:00 PM CST Monday, Dec. 7, 2020 Last Modified: 10:05 PM CST Monday, Dec. 7, 2020 Updates

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This article was published 06/12/2020 (1481 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It has been weeks since Winnipeggers have been able to dine in a restaurant, shop in-person for a majority of goods, or go out for a movie.

Such restrictions aimed at reducing daily case counts of COVID-19 appear to have bottomed out, however, with numbers still too high in the city.

The province moved Winnipeg to code red on its pandemic response scale Nov. 2, followed by the rest of Manitoba on Nov 12. While the Southern Health region has gone from 90 new cases Nov. 12, down to 44 on Sunday, Winnipeg has only dropped from 251 (Nov. 12) to 210 (Sunday).

At the same time, daily double-digit death announcements have become the norm, with hundreds of people in hospital with COVID-19 and some four dozen in intensive care.

Winnipeggers who have been religiously wearing face masks, designating only one family member to do essential shopping once a week, staying clear of family and friends outside of their own household, and either working at home or out of work altogether for the time being must be saying: what the heck?

Chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin says he doesn’t know for certain.

“We are seeing that widespread community transmission,” he said Monday. “We are seeing it now certainly in Winnipeg, affecting those lower-income quintiles which, for a variety of factors, transmission is going in the wrong direction in those areas.”

Roussin said there are probably many reasons for the continued high numbers, “One of which is that we’re just in a well-established second wave.” He said Manitoba is not alone, as case counts are climbing just about everywhere across the country.

“Our restrictions have managed to change that trajectory, at least in the short term,” he said. “So I think these restrictions have made a difference.

“We were, obviously, expecting them to go down further.”

Roll back a few weeks to late October, when a group of Manitoba doctors wrote an open letter to Premier Brian Pallister and Health Minister Cameron Friesen, demanding they implement an immediate lockdown to avoid what they believed would be catastrophic numbers of about 1,000 new daily cases of COVID-19 by the end of November.

At the time the letter was sent there had been a total of 60 Manitobans who had died of COVID-19, and daily case numbers of about 200 being announced provincewide.

Little more than five weeks later, 12 more pandemic deaths were announced Monday, bringing the total to 407. Provincewide, case numbers have been well above 300 per day for weeks, with Winnipeg itself stubbornly holding to around 200/day.

Jason Kindrachuk, a Winnipeg virus expert who worked in West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, and an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba, said it all shows, months after the novel coronavirus began spreading around the world, there’s still a lot that’s not known about it.

“With Ebola, when someone gets sick, they have a 40 to 50 per cent chance of living and 60 to 50 per cent chance of dying but they won’t transmit it until they have symptoms,” Kindrachuk said.

“With COVID, you can transmit it prior to having symptoms — that’s what makes this so hard to deal with.”

Kindrachuk, who is also the Canada Research Chair in emerging viruses, said the problem could be COVID fatigue, with people having their lives restricted for months, the spreading of the virus by people without symptoms, and transmission in some areas of society which haven’t been subject to lockdown.

“I think it is all of it together and you need a heavy measure to get it back down again,” he said. “But at the end of the day, you are still relying on people making the right choices.”

According to Dr. Allan Ronald, a renowned infectious disease expert and founder of the Ugandan-based Academic Alliance for AIDS Care and Prevention in Africa: “My sense is we are all letting up because of the difficulty.”

“There were over 300 new infected people in Winnipeg over the weekend, and I would guess there are probably another 400 to 500 who are infectious that we don’t know about yet during this time span,” Ronald said in an interview.

“I think the problem is we are fatigued. I think the vaccine will start to give people hope and the combination of the vaccine and continuing to do the right things will have an impact,” he said. “And I don’t think we realized how much of an effect it would have in our long-term facilities. They were set up for disaster.”

Roussin said a lot of the current cases are coming through household transmission.

“We’re seeing large, multi-generational households,” he said. “We’re seeing crowded household conditions. We’re seeing a lot of cases that way.

“We are seeing some transmission in workplaces, as well. And a number of linkages that we can’t make right now.”

Roussin said because officials are faced with a large proportion of cases in the downtown and Point Douglas areas of Winnipeg (especially in the homeless/low-income populations), the province is now looking at how it can target them “to better address the challenges that are more unique in those circumstances.”

The code red restrictions haven’t been for nothing, he said. “We did get some significant benefit from these restrictions. We would be in a much worse spot right now.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca

Kevin Rollason
Reporter

Kevin Rollason is one of the more versatile reporters at the Winnipeg Free Press. Whether it is covering city hall, the law courts, or general reporting, Rollason can be counted on to not only answer the 5 Ws — Who, What, When, Where and Why — but to do it in an interesting and accessible way for readers.

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Larry Kusch
Legislature reporter

Larry Kusch didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life until he attended a high school newspaper editor’s workshop in Regina in the summer of 1969 and listened to a university student speak glowingly about the journalism program at Carleton University in Ottawa.

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